PhD Dissertation Proposal by TRAN Huy Vu | Innovations for Next-Generation Wearable-based Systems

About The Talk

Wearable devices are gaining in popularity, but are presently used primarily for productivity-related functions (such as calling people or discreetly receiving notifications) or for physiological sensing. However, wearable devices are still not widely used for a wider set of sensing-based applications, even though their potential is enormous. Wearable devices can enable a variety of novel application. For example, wrist-worn and/or finger-worn devices could be viable controllers for real-time AR/VR games and applications. Similarly, smartglasses with embedded cameras, provide an opportunity to unobtrusively sense and interpret the user’s field of vision. Such camera-based sensing can be used not just for life-logging applications, but can also take advantage of techniques such as visible light communication to enable new forms of device-to-device communication. Of course, the limited battery capacity of such devices remains a major impediment. Clearly, building mechanisms that utilize energy harvesting to reduce or eliminate the dependence on batteries would greatly improve the convenience of wearable use.

In this thesis, I explore the development of new capabilities in wearable sensing along three different dimensions which we believe can help increase the diversity and sophistication of applications and use cases supported by wearable-based systems: (i) Low-latency gesture tracking, (ii) Ultra-low power or Battery-less operation and (iii) Visible Light-based communication. The thesis first explores the ability of smartwatch to recognize hand gestures early and to track the hand trajectory with low latency, so that it can be used in realizing interactive applications. In particular, I show that our techniques allow a wrist-worn device to be used as a real-time hand tracker and gesture recognizer for an interactive application, such as Table Tennis. The thesis then proposes the development of a battery-less wearable device that permits tracking of gestural actions by harvesting power from appropriately beamformed WiFi signals. This work requires innovations in both wearable and WiFi AP operations, which work together to support adequate energy harvesting over distances of several meters. Finally, in my ongoing/proposed work, I propose the use of a wearable-embedded camera (e.g., on a smartglass) to perform practical and robust decoding of visible light-coded transmissions, as a means of enabling practical device-to-device (screen to wearable camera) communication.

Speaker Biography

Tran Huy Vu is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, working in the area of mobile and wearable computing with professor Archan Misra. He received his Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering degree from the Ho Chi Minh University of Technology, Vietnam, in 2009 and 2012 correspondingly. His current research focuses on sensing system on wearable devices.