A body and mind centric approach to Wearable Personal Assistants

Tight integration between humans and computers has long been a vision in wearable computing (“man-machine symbiosis”, “cyborg”), motivated by the potential augmented capabilities in thinking, perceiving, and acting such integration could potentially bring. However, even recent wearable computers (e.g. Google Glass) are far away from such a tight integration with their users. Apart from the purely technological challenges, progress is also hampered by the common attempt by system designers to deploy existing interaction paradigms from desktop and mobile computing (e.g. visual output, touch-based input; explicit human-computer dialogue) to what is in fact a completely new context of use in which computer users interact with the device(s) on the move and in parallel with real-world tasks. This gives rise to several physical, perceptual, and cognitive challenges due to the limitations of human attentional resources. In fact, while wearable computers in recent years have become smaller and closer to our bodies physically, to achieve a tighter man-computer symbiosis, we also need to tie the computer system closer to the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds. In this talk, I discuss challenges of interaction with wearable computers and propose a conceptual model for integrating wearable systems into the human perception-cognition-action loop. I also present my empirical study on design and evaluation of a Wearable Personal Assistant (WPA) for surgeons on the Google Glass platform. Finally, I show some examples of more futuristic interaction techniques that use involuntary eye movements as an implicit input to WPAs which opens new opportunities for unconscious interaction with WPAs (and man-machine symbiosis).

Dr. Shahram Jalaliniya is a postdoctoral researcher at Computer Science and Media Technology Department of Malmö University, where he is a member of Internet of Things and People (IoTaP) research center. His research interests include interaction with wearable computers, eye-based interaction, multimodal interaction, pervasive computing, and Internet of Things. Dr. Jalaliniya has a PhD degree on Human-Computer Interaction from IT University of Copenhagen, he also has two master degrees in information systems from Lund university and in software and technology from the IT University of Copenhagen. He has been working in IT industry as IT consultant and project manager about 10 years before pursuing his research in the area of wearable computing.