Exploring the Potential of Combining Smart Glasses and Consumer-grade EEG/EMG Headsets for Controlling IoT Appliances in the Smart Home

Abstract

The number of smart home appliances that can be connected to the Internet grows every day. In this paper, we explore the potential of combining two emerging head-mounted interaction devices for intuitive control of these devices. Smart glasses are used to detect the object the user wants to control, and an EEG/EMG headset is used for triggering commands to the object of interest. We discuss the research and implementation challenges of identifying devices having the users visual attention and of mapping EEG/EMG headset output to device instructions. By exploiting the user context, we improve the responsiveness and precision of the user intent detection. Despite the enthusiastic reactions of the participants in a small user study, we have learned that the consumer-grade headsets available today present many shortcomings.

The puzzle of ideography

“…Juxtaposing Morin's minor speculations on old-to-new technology influences, the main delimiting constraints on widespread, effective ideography innovation and use arguably have been its inherent combinatorial grapholinguistic complexity, computational encoding-decoding complexity, and difficult technological rendering and deployment (Clark, 2012(Clark, , 2014(Clark, , 2015(Clark, , 2018, each of which relate to Morin's learning and specialization accounts. Traditional communication barriers associated with complexity of pictograms and alternate ideographs now become trivialized through modern advancements in interoperable mobile digital devices, such as smart phones and tablets, smart wearables (e.g., smart glasses), and smart mirrors (De Buyser, De Coninck, Dhoedt, & Simoens, 2016;Lee et al, 2020;Miotto, Danieletto, Scelza, Kidd, & Dudley, 2018). Artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML)-powered virtual technologies enable communicants to easily generate, exchange, interpret, store, and adapt ideographic messages beyond simple stylized emojis in real time, in person nearby or at-a-distance, and within and across populations, cultures, and generations of users, promoting both self-sufficient and general ideographic language emergence and transition (Clark, 2017a(Clark, , 2020).…”