End-User Interaction by Electromyography: the case of the Thalmic Myo armband

Details

Supervisors

Vanderdonckt, Jean

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [60] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed a rapid and worldwide rise in power of the smartphones' usage. From this expansion emerged a competition between the visual-based manner of interacting with mobile devices and the visual attention required from the users towards their environment - crucial in multiple mobile contexts (e.g. driving, running, cycling). Given that context, various methods of interaction that utilize senses beyond vision, qualified as \textit{eyes-free} methods, have been developed during the past years. These methods are based on gesture recognition and the first chapter of this work aims at giving the big picture of it by introducing the most predominant techniques and by ending up with the one on which the device of interest in this work, the Myo armband from Thalmic Labs, relies on. More generally, the scope of this work is twofold. The first part consists in a systematic review of the literature in order to draw up an inventory of the various applications based on the Myo armband. While the first part tends to be theoretical, the second one is more practical and is dedicated to an elicitation study where an application, also focused on the Thalmic Myo armband, has been expressly created for this purpose. This study allowed drawing up a catalog of gestures to be implemented in the Myo armband in case the application was to be developed.