Rotating, Tilting, Bouncing: Using an Interactive Chair to

Promote Activity in Office Environments1Probst, K., 1Lindlbauer, D., 1Greindl, P.,

2Trapp, M., 1Haller, M., 2Schwartz, B., & 3Schrempf, A.2Medical Technology Department, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

1Media Interaction Lab, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

3Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo

CHI EA '13 Work-in-Progress: CSCW

Outline

• Introduction• Related Work• Implementation• Interactions• Challenges • Conclusion

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Introduction (1/4)

• A typical office worker nowadays spends the majority of his time sedentary in the course of his working life

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chronic diseases

prolonged sitting

Introduction (2/4)

• Various possibilities have been proposed to keep people moving during the workday

• For most office workers it is difficult to achieve a considerable reduction of the time spent seated within the office environment

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Introduction (3/4)

• Method : equipping a flexible office chair with motion sensing functionality

• The chair provides an office worker with the possibility to use the movements of his body for tilting, rotating, or bouncing to control his workplace computer

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Introduction (4/4)

• we apply an existing gesture taxonomy to body movements on an active office chair & explore different application scenarios for ubiquitous gestural chair interaction

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Related Work (1/2)

• Existing sensor-based chair interfaces – Chairs– Chair-based tracking data– Usage of interactive chairs

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SenseChair Sensitive Chair Sensing Chair ChairMouse

ChairIO

Related Work (2/2)

• Our work differs from past research :– Usage of an interactive chair within an

office environment, with the goal to promote the implicit and occasional integration of light physical activity into the daily work routine

– Chair interaction in the context of gestural interactions for the control of application-specific functions on a desktop computer

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Implementation• 3Dee active chair • Nordic Semiconductor μBlueTM Smart Remote

equipped with a gyro & an accelerometer• Desktop computer running Microsoft Windows 8

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+gyroscope

+accelerometer

Interactions (1/3)

• We use the gesture taxonomy as a foundation for the proposed interactions to provide users with additional control, and to promote movement in a predominantly sedentary workday

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Interactions (2/3)

• Gesture styles to categorize the proposed chair interactions– Deictic Gestures

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Interactions (2/3)

• Gesture styles to categorize the proposed chair interactions– Manipulating Gestures

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Interactions (2/3)

• Gesture styles to categorize the proposed chair interactions– Semaphoric Gestures

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Interactions (3/3)

• Gesture styles to categorize the proposed chair interactions– Other Interactions

• Use the interaction chair as a presence sensor

• Has information about the presence if the user is sitting at the workplace but not interacting with the computer

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Challenges

• Several challenges when working with gestures: – Fatigue– Non self-revealing– Lack of comfort– Immersion syndrome– Segmentation of (hand) gesture

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Challenges

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Conclusion

• Using the chair as an additional input device has high potential to be a beneficial addition to traditional input devices and motivation of a more active daily work routine

• we plan to evaluate the proposed interactions and compare them to regular interactions with mouse, keyboard and other input methods

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