Paper Info
Title
Designing Groundless Body Channel Communication Systems: Performance and Implications.
Abstract
Novel interactions that capacitively couple electromagnetic (EM) fields between devices and the human body are gaining more attention in the human-computer interaction community. One class of these techniques is Body Channel Communication (BCC), a method that overlays physical touch with digital information. Despite the number of published capacitive sensing and communication prototypes, there exists no guideline on how to design such hardware or what are the application limitations and possibilities. Specifically, wearable (groundless) BCC has been proven in the past to be extremely challenging to implement. Additionally, the exact behavior of the human body as an EM-field medium is still not fully understood today. Consequently, the application domain of BCC technology could not be fully explored. This paper addresses this problem. Based on a recently published general purpose wearable BCC system, we first present a thorough evaluation of the impact of various technical parameter choices and an exhaustive channel characterization of the human body as a host for BCC. Second, we discuss the implications of these results for the application design space and present guidelines for future wearable BCC systems and their applications. Third, we point out an important observation of the measurements, namely that BCC can employ the whole body as user interface (and not just hands or feet). We sketch several applications with these novel interaction modalities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3242587.3242622
UIST '18: The 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Berlin Germany October, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
body channel communication, capacitive coupling, channel characterization, empirical study, wearables, guideline, interaction techniques
Modalities,Computer science,Wearable computer,Communication channel,Human–computer interaction,Application domain,User interface,Empirical research,Human body,Sketch
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5948-1
1
0.36
References 
Authors
28
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Virag Varga141.41
Marc Wyss210.36
Gergely Vakulya341.07
Alanson P Sample418616.26
Thomas R. Gross52807404.74