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Description
Situations of sensory overload are steadily becoming more frequent as the ubiquity of technology approaches reality--particularly with the advent of socio-communicative smartphone applications, and pervasive, high speed wireless networks. Although the ease of accessing information has improved our communication effectiveness and efficiency, our visual and auditory modalities--those modalities that today's computerized devices and displays largely engage--have become overloaded, creating possibilities for distractions, delays and high cognitive load; which in turn can lead to a loss of situational awareness, increasing chances for life threatening situations such as texting while driving. Surprisingly, alternative modalities for information delivery have seen little exploration. Touch, in particular, is a promising candidate given that it is our largest sensory organ with impressive spatial and temporal acuity. Although some approaches have been proposed for touch-based information delivery, they are not without limitations including high learning curves, limited applicability and/or limited expression. This is largely due to the lack of a versatile, comprehensive design theory--specifically, a theory that addresses the design of touch-based building blocks for expandable, efficient, rich and robust touch languages that are easy to learn and use. Moreover, beyond design, there is a lack of implementation and evaluation theories for such languages. To overcome these limitations, a unified, theoretical framework, inspired by natural, spoken language, is proposed called Somatic ABC's for Articulating (designing), Building (developing) and Confirming (evaluating) touch-based languages. To evaluate the usefulness of Somatic ABC's, its design, implementation and evaluation theories were applied to create communication languages for two very unique application areas: audio described movies and motor learning. These applications were chosen as they presented opportunities for complementing communication by offloading information, typically conveyed visually and/or aurally, to the skin. For both studies, it was found that Somatic ABC's aided the design, development and evaluation of rich somatic languages with distinct and natural communication units.
ContributorsMcDaniel, Troy Lee (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This paper presents the design and evaluation of a haptic interface for augmenting human-human interpersonal interactions by delivering facial expressions of an interaction partner to an individual who is blind using a visual-to-tactile mapping of facial action units and emotions. Pancake shaftless vibration motors are mounted on the back of a chair to provide vibrotactile stimulation in the context of a dyadic (one-on-one) interaction across a table. This work explores the design of spatiotemporal vibration patterns that can be used to convey the basic building blocks of facial movements according to the Facial Action Unit Coding System. A behavioral study was conducted to explore the factors that influence the naturalness of conveying affect using vibrotactile cues.
ContributorsBala, Shantanu (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis director) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Currently, one of the biggest limiting factors for long-term deployment of autonomous systems is the power constraints of a platform. In particular, for aerial robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the energy resource is the main driver of mission planning and operation definitions, as everything revolved around flight time. The focus of this work is to develop a new method of energy storage and charging for autonomous UAV systems, for use during long-term deployments in a constrained environment. We developed a charging solution that allows pre-equipped UAV system to land on top of designated charging pads and rapidly replenish their battery reserves, using a contact charging point. This system is designed to work with all types of rechargeable batteries, focusing on Lithium Polymer (LiPo) packs, that incorporate a battery management system for increased reliability. The project also explores optimization methods for fleets of UAV systems, to increase charging efficiency and extend battery lifespans. Each component of this project was first designed and tested in computer simulation. Following positive feedback and results, prototypes for each part of this system were developed and rigorously tested. Results show that the contact charging method is able to charge LiPo batteries at a 1-C rate, which is the industry standard rate, maintaining the same safety and efficiency standards as modern day direct connection chargers. Control software for these base stations was also created, to be integrated with a fleet management system, and optimizes UAV charge levels and distribution to extend LiPo battery lifetimes while still meeting expected mission demand. Each component of this project (hardware/software) was designed for manufacturing and implementation using industry standard tools, making it ideal for large-scale implementations. This system has been successfully tested with a fleet of UAV systems at Arizona State University, and is currently being integrated into an Arizona smart city environment for deployment.
ContributorsMian, Sami (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Societal infrastructure is built with vision at the forefront of daily life. For those with
severe visual impairments, this creates countless barriers to the participation and
enjoyment of life’s opportunities. Technological progress has been both a blessing and
a curse in this regard. Digital text together with screen readers and refreshable Braille
displays have made whole libraries readily accessible and rideshare tech has made
independent mobility more attainable. Simultaneously, screen-based interactions and
experiences have only grown in pervasiveness and importance, precluding many of
those with visual impairments.
Sensory Substituion, the process of substituting an unavailable modality with
another one, has shown promise as an alternative to accomodation, but in recent
years meaningful strides in Sensory Substitution for vision have declined in frequency.
Given recent advances in Computer Vision, this stagnation is especially disconcerting.
Designing Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) for vision for use in interactive settings
that leverage modern Computer Vision techniques presents a variety of challenges
including perceptual bandwidth, human-computer-interaction, and person-centered
machine learning considerations. To surmount these barriers an approach called Per-
sonal Foveated Haptic Gaze (PFHG), is introduced. PFHG consists of two primary
components: a human visual system inspired interaction paradigm that is intuitive
and flexible enough to generalize to a variety of applications called Foveated Haptic
Gaze (FHG), and a person-centered learning component to address the expressivity
limitations of most SSDs. This component is called One-Shot Object Detection by
Data Augmentation (1SODDA), a one-shot object detection approach that allows a
user to specify the objects they are interested in locating visually and with minimal
effort realizing an object detection model that does so effectively.
The Personal Foveated Haptic Gaze framework was realized in a virtual and real-
world application: playing a 3D, interactive, first person video game (DOOM) and
finding user-specified real-world objects. User study results found Foveated Haptic
Gaze to be an effective and intuitive interface for interacting with dynamic visual
world using solely haptics. Additionally, 1SODDA achieves competitive performance
among few-shot object detection methods and high-framerate many-shot object de-
tectors. The combination of which paves the way for modern Sensory Substitution
Devices for vision.
severe visual impairments, this creates countless barriers to the participation and
enjoyment of life’s opportunities. Technological progress has been both a blessing and
a curse in this regard. Digital text together with screen readers and refreshable Braille
displays have made whole libraries readily accessible and rideshare tech has made
independent mobility more attainable. Simultaneously, screen-based interactions and
experiences have only grown in pervasiveness and importance, precluding many of
those with visual impairments.
Sensory Substituion, the process of substituting an unavailable modality with
another one, has shown promise as an alternative to accomodation, but in recent
years meaningful strides in Sensory Substitution for vision have declined in frequency.
Given recent advances in Computer Vision, this stagnation is especially disconcerting.
Designing Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) for vision for use in interactive settings
that leverage modern Computer Vision techniques presents a variety of challenges
including perceptual bandwidth, human-computer-interaction, and person-centered
machine learning considerations. To surmount these barriers an approach called Per-
sonal Foveated Haptic Gaze (PFHG), is introduced. PFHG consists of two primary
components: a human visual system inspired interaction paradigm that is intuitive
and flexible enough to generalize to a variety of applications called Foveated Haptic
Gaze (FHG), and a person-centered learning component to address the expressivity
limitations of most SSDs. This component is called One-Shot Object Detection by
Data Augmentation (1SODDA), a one-shot object detection approach that allows a
user to specify the objects they are interested in locating visually and with minimal
effort realizing an object detection model that does so effectively.
The Personal Foveated Haptic Gaze framework was realized in a virtual and real-
world application: playing a 3D, interactive, first person video game (DOOM) and
finding user-specified real-world objects. User study results found Foveated Haptic
Gaze to be an effective and intuitive interface for interacting with dynamic visual
world using solely haptics. Additionally, 1SODDA achieves competitive performance
among few-shot object detection methods and high-framerate many-shot object de-
tectors. The combination of which paves the way for modern Sensory Substitution
Devices for vision.
ContributorsFakhri, Bijan (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy L (Committee member) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Amor, Heni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Speech is known to serve as an early indicator of neurological decline, particularly in motor diseases. There is significant interest in developing automated, objective signal analytics that detect clinically-relevant changes and in evaluating these algorithms against the existing gold-standard: perceptual evaluation by trained speech and language pathologists. Hypernasality, the result of poor control of the velopharyngeal flap---the soft palate regulating airflow between the oral and nasal cavities---is one such speech symptom of interest, as precise velopharyngeal control is difficult to achieve under neuromuscular disorders. However, a host of co-modulating variables give hypernasal speech a complex and highly variable acoustic signature, making it difficult for skilled clinicians to assess and for automated systems to evaluate. Previous work in rating hypernasality from speech relies on either engineered features based on statistical signal processing or machine learning models trained end-to-end on clinical ratings of disordered speech examples. Engineered features often fail to capture the complex acoustic patterns associated with hypernasality, while end-to-end methods tend to overfit to the small datasets on which they are trained. In this thesis, I present a set of acoustic features, models, and strategies for characterizing hypernasality in dysarthric speech that split the difference between these two approaches, with the aim of capturing the complex perceptual character of hypernasality without overfitting to the small datasets available. The features are based on acoustic models trained on a large corpus of healthy speech, integrating expert knowledge to capture known perceptual characteristics of hypernasal speech. They are then used in relatively simple linear models to predict clinician hypernasality scores. These simple models are robust, generalizing across diseases and outperforming comprehensive set of baselines in accuracy and correlation. This novel approach represents a new state-of-the-art in objective hypernasality assessment.
ContributorsSaxon, Michael Stephen (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020