I’m drawn towards using the conductivity of our bodies to either stimulate muscles or senses, or muscle and body activity as an input. A few of the students here this past semester have been working on a sensor called the Touche. It measures the capacitance of any conductive body or object along a frequency sweep, so that a sort of spectrum analysis is done. This gives the sensor reading much more than a linear reading, so that machine learning algorithms can map it’s different positions, or the readings can be mapped onto more complex forms of data. I’ve been dying to try out this sensor, and so I’ve started brainstorming on different projects applicable to this class. The paper can be found at this link, and they seem to feel tied to using machine learning to memorize the different positions for a given body. This would be the ideal way to map the sensor to a range of values or few different states, but it needs engineering skills I don’t possess, and more importantly to me it costs time, somewhere around a few hundred milliseconds at times.
Another idea I’ve looked into is using haptic feedback to augment, replace, or accent our current senses. Sanniti has the idea of using vibration and motors to help deaf dancers stay on beat, and I’ve found this paper on a group of people who made a haptic feedback suit. Their results showed that users showed signs if increased sensitivity to sounds and touch when added to by some form of haptic feedback. This seems promising to be a project with strong results, plus it would be fun to work with music, and wireless wearables. The big questions with this idea would be the design of the wearable, so that it would impede the dancer’s abilities, and also the design of where and what the feedback is. I’m leaning towards vibrations near the head, but this isn’t based on any research just yet.
My third idea is from the topic of using the electrical activity if our muscles as a computer input. This paper I found focuses on the sounds our muscles make while being in use, but this is really just amplified currents in our muscles. These changes in amplitude could be measured and mapped to any input. I recently saw a product being advertised called the Myo, and it seems to me that, like the Touche, it requires heavy coding and also costs time, however simple amplitudes are less complicated than frequency responses, so perhaps it wouldn’t be as big of a problem. This could then be mapped to some sort of game, instrument, or whatever form of media.