There is a growing demand for flexible and soft electronic devices. In particular, stretchable, skin-mountable, and wearable strain sensors are needed for several potential applications including personalized health-monitoring, human motion detection, human-machine interfaces, soft robotics, and so forth. This Feature Article presents recent advancements in the development of flexible and stretchable strain sensors. The article shows that highly stretchable strain sensors are successfully being developed by new mechanisms such as disconnection between overlapped nanomaterials, crack propagation in thin films, and tunneling effect, different from traditional strain sensing mechanisms. Strain sensing performances of recently reported strain sensors are comprehensively studied and discussed, showing that appropriate choice of composite structures as well as suitable interaction between functional nanomaterials and polymers are essential for the high performance strain sensing. Next, simulation results of piezoresistivity of stretchable strain sensors by computational models are reported. Finally, potential applications of flexible strain sensors are described. This survey reveals that flexible, skin-mountable, and wearable strain sensors have potential in diverse applications while several grand challenges have to be still overcome.

Stretchable, Skin-Mountable, and Wearable Strain Sensors and Their Potential Applications: A Review

The demand for flexible and wearable electronic devices is increasing due to their facile interaction with human body. Flexible, stretchable and wearable sensors can be easily mounted on clothing or directly attached onto the body. Especially, highly stretchable and sensitive strain sensors are needed for the human motion detection. Here, we report highly flexible, stretchable and sensitive strain sensors based on the nanocomposite of silver nanowire (AgNW) network and PDMS elastomer in the form of the sandwich structure (i.e., AgNW thin film embedded between two layers of PDMS). The AgNW network-elastomer nanocomposite based strain sensors show strong piezoresistivity with tunable gauge factors in the ranges of 2 to 14 and a high stretchability up to 70%. We demonstrate the applicability of our high performance strain sensors by fabricating a glove integrated with five strain sensors for the motion detection of fingers and control of an avatar in the virtual environment.

Highly Stretchable and Sensitive Strain Sensor Based on Silver Nanowire–Elastomer Nanocomposite

As computers become more pervasive in society, facilitating natural human---computer interaction (HCI) will have a positive impact on their use. Hence, there has been growing interest in the development of new approaches and technologies for bridging the human---computer barrier. The ultimate aim is to bring HCI to a regime where interactions with computers will be as natural as an interaction between humans, and to this end, incorporating gestures in HCI is an important research area. Gestures have long been considered as an interaction technique that can potentially deliver more natural, creative and intuitive methods for communicating with our computers. This paper provides an analysis of comparative surveys done in this area. The use of hand gestures as a natural interface serves as a motivating force for research in gesture taxonomies, its representations and recognition techniques, software platforms and frameworks which is discussed briefly in this paper. It focuses on the three main phases of hand gesture recognition i.e. detection, tracking and recognition. Different application which employs hand gestures for efficient interaction has been discussed under core and advanced application domains. This paper also provides an analysis of existing literature related to gesture recognition systems for human computer interaction by categorizing it under different key parameters. It further discusses the advances that are needed to further improvise the present hand gesture recognition systems for future perspective that can be widely used for efficient human computer interaction. The main goal of this survey is to provide researchers in the field of gesture based HCI with a summary of progress achieved to date and to help identify areas where further research is needed.

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Vision based hand gesture recognition for human computer interaction: a survey

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. David McNeill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 416 pp.

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought

The available versions of the Vandenberg and Kuse (1978) Mental Rotations Test (MRT) have physically deteriorated because only copies of copies are available. We report results from a redrawn version of the MRT and for alternate versions of the test. Males perform better than females, and students drawn from the physical sciences perform better than students drawn from the social sciences and humanities, confirming other reports with the original version of the MRT. Subjects find it very hard to perform the MRT when stimuli require rotation along both the top/bottom axis and the left/right axis. The magnitude of effect sizes for sex (which account, on average, for some 20% of the variance) does not increase with increasing difficulty of the task. Minimal strategy effects were observed and females did not perform differently during the menstrual period as opposed to the days between the menstrual periods. Practice effects are dramatic, confirming other reports with the original MRT, and can also be shown to be powerful in a transfer for practice paradigm, where test and retest involve different versions of the MRT. Main effects of handedness on MRT performance were not found.

A redrawn Vandenverg and Kuse mental rotations test : different versions and factors that affect performance

A footing box has notches for receiving an end of grooved grade beams. The end of each beam includes an aperture for receiving a reinforcing rod extending lengthwise from a grooved column supported on the ends of the beams in the footing box, to enable the grade beams and column to be unified when grout is poured into the footing box. Grooved roof beams are supported at their ends by the column and connected to the column by a reinforcing rod extending through an aperture in the end of each roof beam. Wall panels are positioned in the grooves of the column and the beams.

Out-of-core construction and 3d visualization of level-of-detail terrains populated with large collection of heterogeneous objects

Object tracking is one of the promising fields of research in the domain of image processing and computer vision. This paper deals with detection and tracking of moving objects. Detecting the region which is moving in the search region of a video is the first step. Tracking the object over frames is the second step and the most important one too. The first step can be achieved by background subtraction. Particle filter is used for estimating the object. In the second process, prediction and correction are the two tasks to achieve. In the process of prediction, resampling of particles in the search space region generates a sample impoverishment problem. To overcome this problem Continuous Opinion Dynamic Optimizer algorithm is used. This algorithm provides social rank to every particle for selection. CODO is combined with the particle filter algorithm and tested on the dataset. It contains different movements of objects randomly, partially occluded. The results of the proposed method are compared by calculating error difference from the previous method.

Reduction of sample impoverishment problem in particle filter for object tracking

Designing interactive systems is an interdisciplinary field in which computer scientists, engineers, neuro-scientists, radiologists, psychologists, social scientists, design professionals and others play important roles. The goal of this field is to solve real problems in the design and use of technology, making computer controlled and computer-based systems easier to use and more effective for people and organizations. Ease of use fitting the technical level of operator and effectiveness in services are critical to the success of any systems that interact with people, including software systems, home, office and factory appliances, web applications, infotainment systems, medical diagnostics and treatment systems, learning systems etc. Designing interactive systems needs to be human-centered.

New paradigms for interacting with computers are being developed which will define the 21st century standards and enable the world to communicate and interact effortlessly and intuitively. Much of today's research in interactive technologies lacks a tight coupling between technology innovation and end-user needs. The development of intelligent interactive systems would need to address the issues related to wide variety of cultures and languages, different levels of literacy and education, new sets of users with different experience, attitudes, expectations and capabilities. The aim of current research in designing intelligent interactive systems is to make the interaction between computers and people smarter. Unlike traditional Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), we are willing more to consider solutions that involve large amounts of knowledge, heuristics, and emerging technologies such as brain-computer interfaces, natural language understanding or gesture recognition etc to serve the purpose effortlessly.

The goal of the conference is to bring together researchers working on all aspects of aforesaid and related devices and solutions seamlessly on human-centered design of interactive systems and multimedia technologies. All original contributions will be welcome which address a wide range of theoretical and practical application issues in development of Intelligent Interactive Systems and Multimedia (IITM).

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Technologies and Multimedia

The classification of multispectral satellite images is a challenging problem and has a number of applications such as feature identification, change detection, etc We apply modified neural network algorithms: GA-BP (genetic algorithm as precursor to the back propagation) and modular artificial neural network (MNN) to classify the LISS-3 image of Allahabad area We also classify the resolution merged image (USS-3 with PAN) using the same algorithms By using genetic algorithm as a precursor to ANN, we increase the probability of reaching to the global minimum, thus reducing the problem of a stuck neural network in the local minimum MNN models the human brain more closely to apply task decomposition to the satellite images as well The output of the above techniques are generated and analyzed

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CORSISCA: classification of remotely sensed images-a soft computing approach

Traditional human–computer interaction devices such as the keyboard and mouse become ineffective for an effective interaction with the virtual environment applications because the 3D applications need a new interaction device. An efficient human interaction with the modern virtual environments requires more natural devices. Among them the "Hand Gesture" human–computer interaction modality has recently become of major interest. The main objective of gesture recognition research is to build a system which can recognize human gestures and utilize them to control an application. One of the drawbacks of present gesture recognition systems is being application-dependent which makes it difficult to transfer one gesture control interface into multiple applications. This paper focuses on designing a hand gesture recognition system which is vocabulary independent as well as adaptable to multiple applications. This makes the proposed system vocabulary independent and application independent. The designed system is comprised of the different processing steps like detection, segmentation, tracking, recognition, etc. Vocabulary independence has been incorporated in the proposed system with the help of a robust gesture mapping module that allows the user for cognitive mapping of different gestures to the same command and vice versa. For performance analysis of the proposed system accuracy, recognition rate and command response time have been compared. These parameters have been considered because they analyze the vital impact on the performance of the proposed vocabulary and application-independent hand gesture recognition system.

Anupam Agrawal

Papers

Out-of-core construction and 3d visualization of level-of-detail terrains populated with large collection of heterogeneous objects

Reduction of sample impoverishment problem in particle filter for object tracking

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Technologies and Multimedia

CORSISCA: classification of remotely sensed images-a soft computing approach

Hand gesture recognition towards vocabulary and application independency