SUSAN GOV	portfolio    ::    resume    ::    about    ::    contact
Wearable RFID for Play

Part 1 Writeup (.pdf)
Part 2 Progress Report (.pdf)
This project is a two-part project that explores the development of wearable RFID systems. In the first part of this project, my teammate and I built a wearable RFID reader from a Phidgets RFID reader contained within a housing that was then attached to a glove (see top left image below). The limitation of this setup is that it is not wireless and it depends on a cable connecting the reader to a computer. This severly limits the feasibility of using the configuration in accomplishing a real-world task. For the second part of this project, we explored other alternatives to the initial reader we built. We were able to successfully build a wearable, wireless RFID reader from a SonMicro RFID kit and a serial-over-Bluetooth module. This setup is entirely wireless and is powered by a 9V battery. We have attached this configuration to a glove and have enclosed the remaining hardware in a cloth encasing (see top right image below). We were also interested in exploring possible collaborative, interactive games that can be built to be played with our wearable RFID reader. The majority of work done in the field of wearable RFID has been for the purposes of activity recognition within the context of elderly care, so exploring a more fun and social use of these readers represents a novel application of this hardware. Thus, we built a simple two-player game consisting of a game board covered with 20 circles (four circles in each of five colors - blue, green, yellow, pink, and white). Each circle has an RFID tag underneath it, and the object of the game is to hit all circles of a given color as quickly as possible (see bottom image below). Each player takes turns hitting all four circles of the color specified by the computer, and the player's turn is not open until s/he has hit all four circles of that color. The computer provides visual feedback each time a previously unseen circle of the correct color is detected and keeps a running score for each player corresponding to the total time the player spends during his/her turns. The winner of the game is the player who has the lowest score. We also conducted a preliminary usability evaluation of our wearable RFID reader when used to play our game. We wrote a paper that was presented at the Tangible Play: Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games Workshop at the 2007 Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) Conference (January 28-31, 2007, Honolulu, HI).
Teammate: Yevgeniy Medynskiy CS 7470 (Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing) is a graduate level course aimed at educating students in important topics and research in the field of mobile and ubiquitous computing. With this focus, the course is centered around two pair projects giving students the experience in doing research from the perspective of the class. Also, another goal of these projects is being able to think about, plan, and analyze work from this perspective.