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Social Sensing: a Wi-Fi based Social Sense for Perceiving the Surrounding People

Published: 25 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

People who are blind or have social disabilities can encounter difficulties in properly sensing and interacting with surrounding people. We suggest here the use of a sensory augmentation approach, which will offer the user perceptual input via properly functioning sensory channels (e.g. visual, tactile) for this purpose. Specifically, we created a Wi-Fi signal based system to help the user determine the presence of one or more people in the room. The signal's strength determines the distance of the people in near proximity. These distances are sonified and played sequentially. The Wi-Fi signal arises from common Smartphones, and can therefore be adapted for everyday use in a simple manner.
We demonstrate the use of this system by showing it's significance in determining the presence of others. Specifically, we show that it allows to determine the location (i.e. close, inside or outside) and amount of people at each distance. This system can be further adopted for purposes such as locating one's group in a crowd, following a group in a new location, enhancing identification for people with prosopagnosia, raising awareness for the presence of others as part of a rehabilitation behavioral program for people with ASD, or for real-life social networking.

References

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A. Chang, S. O'Modhrain, R. Jacob, E. Gunther, and H. Ishii. Comtouch: Design of a vibrotactile communication device. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, DIS '02, pages 312--320, New York, NY, USA, 2002. ACM.
[2]
J. Hoshen. Personal locator services emerge. Spectrum, IEEE, 37(2):41--48, Feb 2000.
[3]
S. Maidenbaum, S. Abboud, and A. Amedi. Sensory substitution: Closing the gap between basic research and widespread practical visual rehabilitation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 41:3--15, 2014. Multisensory integration, sensory substitution and visual rehabilitation.
[4]
S. Maidenbaum and A. Amedi. Sensory substitution and augmentation - what's happening "under the hood" in our brain? Assistive Augmentation, 2014.
[5]
R. A. Scott. Deviance: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach, chapter The Making of Blind Man, pages 236--241. G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. General Hall, 1995.

Cited By

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  • (2023)Investigating Sensory Extensions as Input for Interactive SimulationsProceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3569009.3573108(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Augmented CBRNE Responder - Directions for Future Research13th Augmented Human International Conference10.1145/3532525.3532533(1-4)Online publication date: 26-May-2022
  • (2022)Gapeau: Enhancing the Sense of Distance to Others with a Head-Mounted SensorProceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3490149.3501323(1-19)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
AH '16: Proceedings of the 7th Augmented Human International Conference 2016
February 2016
258 pages
ISBN:9781450336802
DOI:10.1145/2875194
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

In-Cooperation

  • University of Geneva

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 February 2016

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Author Tags

  1. Blind
  2. Sensory Substitution
  3. Sensory augmentation
  4. Social

Qualifiers

  • Poster
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Funding Sources

  • The European Research Council Grant
  • The Israel Science Foundation
  • James S. McDonnel Foundation scholar award

Conference

AH '16
AH '16: Augmented Human International Conference 2016
February 25 - 27, 2016
Geneva, Switzerland

Acceptance Rates

AH '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 21 of 138 submissions, 15%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 121 of 306 submissions, 40%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Investigating Sensory Extensions as Input for Interactive SimulationsProceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3569009.3573108(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Augmented CBRNE Responder - Directions for Future Research13th Augmented Human International Conference10.1145/3532525.3532533(1-4)Online publication date: 26-May-2022
  • (2022)Gapeau: Enhancing the Sense of Distance to Others with a Head-Mounted SensorProceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3490149.3501323(1-19)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2022
  • (2018)Event Estimation Accuracy of Social Sensing With Facebook for Social Internet of VehiclesIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2018.28466975:4(2449-2456)Online publication date: Aug-2018
  • (2017)HandshakARProceedings of the 8th Augmented Human International Conference10.1145/3041164.3041203(1-5)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2017

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