Vuokko Lantz

• Dr, Docent
• Business Development Manager at Emberion Oy

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Undulating Covers (UnCovers), mobile interfaces that can change their surface texture to transmit information. The Pin Array UnCover incorporates sinusoidal ridges controlled by servomotors, which can change their amplitude and granularity. The Mylar UnCover is a more organic interface that exp...

When users want to interact with an in-air gesture system, they must first address it. This involves finding where to gesture so that their actions can be sensed, and how to direct their input towards that system so that they do not also affect others or cause unwanted effects. This is an important problem which lacks a practical solution. We prese...

In-air hand gestures allow users to interact with mobile phones without reaching out and touching them. Users need helpful and meaningful feedback while they gesture, although mobile phones have limited feedback capabilities because of their small screen sizes. Interactive light feedback illuminates the surface surrounding a mobile phone, giving us...

Recent technologies allow us to interact with our homes in novel ways, such as using in-air gestures for control. However, gestures require good feedback and small appliances, like lighting controls and thermostats, have limited, or no, display capabilities. Our research explores how other output types can be used to give users feedback about their...

Above-device gesture interfaces let people interact in the space above mobile devices using hand and finger movements. For example, users could gesture over a mobile phone or wearable without having to use the touchscreen. We look at how above-device interfaces can also give feedback in the space over the device. Recent haptic and wearable technolo...

While smartphones are increasing in size and complex features, new form factors for simple communication devices are emerging. In this paper, we present the design process for a wrist worn communication device, which enables the user to send text messages over a paired mobile phone. The process includes concept design, user evaluation, design itera...

Around-device interaction lets people use their phones without having to pick them up or reach out and touch them. This allows interaction when touch may not be available; for example, users could gesture to interact with their phones while cooking, avoiding touching the screen with messy hands. Well-designed feedback helps users overcome uncertain...

Gestures above a mobile phone would let users interact with their devices quickly and easily from a distance. While both researchers and smartphone manufacturers develop new gesture sensing technologies, little is known about how best to design these gestures and interaction techniques. Our research looks at creating usable and socially acceptable...

Pressing a virtual button is still the major interaction method in touchscreen mobile phones. Although phones are becoming more and more powerful, operating system software is getting more and more complex causing latency in interaction. We were interested in gaining insight into touch-feedback simultaneity and the effects of latency on the perceiv...

Devices such as mobile phones have made it possible to take part in remote audio conferences regardless of one's physical location. Mobile phones also allow for new ways to interact with other conference participants. We present a study on evaluating the user experiences of a mobile audio conferencing system that was augmented with spatial audio, h...

While gesture taxonomies provide a classification of device-based gestures in terms of communicative intent, little work has addressed the usability differences in manually performing these gestures. In this primarily qualitative study, we investigate how two sets of iconic gestures that vary in familiarity, mimetic and alphabetic, are affected und...

Haptic technology provides a channel for interpersonal communication through the sense of touch. In the development of novel haptic communication devices, it is essential to explore people's use behaviors and perceptions of such a communication channel. To this end, we conducted a laboratory study on haptically augmented remote interpersonal commun...

ForcePhone is a mobile synchronous haptic communication system. During phone calls, users can squeeze the side of the device and the pressure level is mapped to vibrations on the recipient's device. The pressure/vibrotactile messages supported by ForcePhone are called pressages. Using a lab-based study and a small field study, this paper addresses...

This paper presents a framework for hand gesture recognition based on the information fusion of a three-axis accelerometer (ACC) and multichannel electromyography (EMG) sensors. In our framework, the start and end points of meaningful gesture segments are detected automatically by the intensity of the EMG signals. A decision tree and multistream hi...

This paper describes a method for creating virtual textures without force feedback by using a simple motion sensor and a single vibrotactile actuator. It is based on wavetable synthesis driven by the user's hand movements. The output of the synthesis is rendered with the tactile actuator attached in a hand-held box together with the motion sensor....

This paper presents a new method of gesture recognition based on multiple sensors fusion technique. Three kinds of sensors, namely surface Electromyography (sEMG) sensor, 3-axis accelerometer (ACC) and camera, are used together to capture the dynamic hand gesture firstly. Then four types of features are extracted from the three kinds of sensory dat...

This study explored the feasibility of building robust surface electromyography (EMG)-based gesture interfaces starting from the definition of input command gestures. As a first step, an offline experimental scheme was carried out for extracting user-independent input command sets with high class separability, reliability and low individual variati...

This paper investigates the feasibility of building muscle-computer interfaces starting from surface Electromyography (SEMG) -based neck and shoulder motion recognition. In order to reach the research goal, a real-time SEMG sensing, processing and classification system was developed firstly. Then two types of SEMG recognition experiments, namely us...

This study is based on a user scenario where augmented reality targets could be found by scanning the environment with a mobile device and getting a tactile feedback exactly in the direction of the target. In order to understand how accurately and quickly the targets can be found, we prepared an experiment setup where a sensor-actuator device consi...

This paper describes a novel hand gesture recognition system that utilizes both multi-channel surface electromyogram (EMG) sensors and 3D accelerometer (ACC) to realize user-friendly interaction between human and computers. Signal segments of meaningful gestures are determined from the continuous EMG signal inputs. Multi-stream Hidden Markov Models...

This study explores the test-retest repeatability of surface EMG measurements during hand gesture tasks across days and across subjects. Subjects took part in the data collection experiments on five separate days in a four-week time period. Surface EMG (sEMG) data was collected from the forearm. Intrasubject and intersubject test-retest repeatabili...

The goal of this study is to explore the effects of electrode place-ment on the hand gesture pattern recognition performance. We have conducted experiments with surface EMG sensors using two detecting electrode channels. In total 25 different hand gestures and 10 different electrode positions for measuring muscle activities have been evaluated. Bas...

In this paper we present results of a study where perception of dynamic audiotactile feedback to gesture input was examined. Our main motivation was to investigate how users' active input and different modality conditions effect the perception of the feedback. The experimental prototype in the study was a handheld sensor-actuator device that respon...

ABSTRACT Proper feedback,is one of the challenges in gesture interaction. Providing continuous,feedback,during,the,execution,of the gesture increases the feeling of control and it can help user to perform the task more,efficiently. In this paper we introduce an experimental,handheld,sensor-actuator device,that responds dynamically,to user’s motion....

This paper proposes an adaptive feature extraction method for pattern recognition of hand gesture action sEMG to enhance the reusability of myoelectric control. The feature extractor is based on wavelet packet transform and Local Discriminant Basis (LDB) algorithms to select several optimized decomposition subspaces of origin SEMG waveforms caused...

For realizing multi-DOF interfaces in wearable computer system, accelerometers and surface EMG sensors are used synchronously to detect hand movement information for multiple hand gesture recognition. Experiments were designed to collect gesture data with both sensing techniques to compare their performance in the recognition of various wrist and f...

For realizing a multi-DOF myoelectric control system with a minimal number of sensors, research work on the recognition of twenty-four hand gestures based on two-channel surface EMG signal measured from human forearm muscles has been carried out. Third-order AR model coefficients, Mean Absolute Value and Mean Absolute Value ratio of the sEMG signal...

We have realized an online gesture recognition platform for hand gestures using 2-channel surface EMG signals acquired from the forearm. Several features, such as AMV, AMV ratio and fourth-order AR model coefficients are extracted from the sEMG signal and the gesture segments are recognized with a Weighted Euclidean Distance Classifier. An above 90...

Handwriting recognition (HWR) input method has been considered to be one of the most usable text entry methods for handheld devices, especially for languages with large and complicated character sets such as Chinese. The paper studies stroke break times within handwritten characters and presents a new method for setting HWR timeout by examining the...

We describe a rhythmic interaction mechanism for mobile devices. A PocketPC with a three degree of freedom linear acceleration meter is used as the experimental platform for data acquisition. Dynamic Movement Primitives are used to learn the limit cycle behavior associated with the rhythmic gestures. We outline the open technical and user experienc...

This work reports experiments with four hierarchical clustering algorithms and two clustering indices for online handwritten characters. The main motivation of the work is to develop an automatic method for finding a set of prototypical characters which would represent well the different writing styles present in a large international database. One...

This work shows how a self-organizing map (SOM) can be applied in the analysis of different handwriting styles. The handwriting samples analyzed have been collected in online fashion with special writing equipments such as pressure sensitive tablets. The handwriting style of an individual subject is represented by a vector components of which refle...

This work reports experiments with four hierarchical clustering algorithms and two clustering indices for online handwritten character recognition. The main motivation of the work is to develop an automatic method for finding a set of prototypical characters which would represent well the different writing styles present in a large international da...

The main goal of the work presented in this thesis has been the development of an on-line handwriting recognition system which is able to recognize handwritten characters of several different writing styles and is able to improve its performance by adapting itself to new writing styles. The recognition method should be applicable to hand-held devic...

We have considered problems involved in the self-supervised learning process of an on-line handwriting recognition system. Our system is able to recognize isolated characters by comparing them to prototype characters with a method based on the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm. The recognition system is adapted by adding new prototypes, inactivating c...

This work describes a prototype-based online handwritten character recognition system and a two-phase recognition scheme aimed to speed up the recognition. In the first phase, the prototype set is pruned and ordered on the basis of preclassification performed with heavily down-sampled characters and prototypes. In the second phase, the final classi...

Introduction The user interface of a hand-held device cannot be directly adopted from normal-sized computers. Naturally, all the output has to be presentable with a small display of lower resolution. However, the traditional input methods cannot be just scaled down. A miniature keyboard is not convenient to use if the keys are smaller than nger tip...

This work shows how a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) can be applied in the analysis of different handwriting styles. Handwriting styles are represented with vectors whose components reflect the tendencies of the writers to use certain prototypical styles for isolated alphanumeric characters. The study shows that the correlations between different writin...

This work describes a prototype-based online handwritten character recognition system and a two-phase recognition scheme aimed to speed up the recognition. In the first phase, the prototype set is pruned and ordered on the basis of preclassification performed with heavily down-sampled characters and prototypes. In the second phase, the final classi...

This paper describes an adaptive recognition system for isolated handwritten characters and the experiments carried out with it. The characters used in our experiments are alphanumeric characters, including both the upper- and lower-case versions of the Latin alphabets and three Scandinavian diacriticals. The writers are allowed to use their own na...

The purpose of this paper is to summarize our work on adaptive on-line recognition methods for handwritten characters. Reports on the work have been published in various conference proceedings and book chapters. As each publication covers only some specific part of our work, it is hard to see the whole picture and get a good overview of the whole w...

Methods for controlling the adaptation process of an online handwritten character recognizer are studied. The classifier is based on the k-nearest neighbor rule and it is adapted to a new writing style by adding new prototypes, deactivating confusing prototypes, and reshaping existing prototypes in a self-supervised fashion. The dissimilarity measu...

In this paper, an adaptive on-line recognizer is described. The recognizer is based on k nearest neighbor rule. It is used for recognizing isolated alphanumeric characters including both the upper and lower case versions of the letters and some Scandinavian diacriticals. The recognition system has six different dissimilarity measures which all are...

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Contents 1 Background 4 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.2 Types of handwriting recognition systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2.1 Ooe-line recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2.2 On-line recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2.3 Chara...