Paper Reading #6: Implanted user interfaces

Introduction
Title: Implanted user interfaces
Author Bios:

• Christian Holz-Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada & Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany
• Tovi Grossman-Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• George Fitzmaurice-Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Anne Agur-University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Summary

In this paper they discussed implanting user interfaces underneath human skin. They went over 4 of the main obstacles that are coupled with implanting devices under the skin, they were input, output, communication, and power supply. They came up with several solutions for each category and tested them on a cadaver. For input they tested a button, pressure sensor and a tap sensor. For output they tested LED, a vibration motor, and a speaker. They only tested Bluetooth for communication even though they though WiFi would work also. For a power source they had an inductive charger recharging a battery. This was not the actual study, all of this testing was to make a prototype that could be tested on users. The prototype was placed under artificial skin and users tested it out while doing other activities.

Related Work

The papers they referenced in the paper were more or less explanations of how this is a novel idea and things that explained an idea that they had in the paper so there are not many papers on related work to implanted user interfaces. There are papers on user interfaces but none on implanted user interfaces even in the paper they say "Despite these potential benefits there had been little or no investigation of implanted user interfaces from an HCI perspective."

• A miniaturized tunable microstrip antenna for wireless communications with implanted medical devices
• Wireless monitoring of electrode-tissues interfaces for long term characterization
• Towards an activity-aware wearable computing platform based on an egocentric interaction model

Evaluation

The way they evaluated the actual study was they had 4 users wear the artificial skin with the prototype underneath it and had them go out and public and do certain things. The prototype would interrupt them with a game that it had set up and they would try to get a high score. After about an hour they asked the user how easy it was to use the device and which input/output devices they liked the most. So the overall evaluation was qualitative, they asked the users what they thought of the device. What they found was that people disliked the pressure sensor and the LED was hard to see in the light.

Discussion

 I thought that the idea of implanted user interfaces was very interesting. I pictured people walking around texting on their arm, or checking email in their hand. They explained in the paper that this was a novel idea, people had looked into worn interfaces and things like that but never implanted interfaces that provided some sort of feedback.