Hello everyone, I'm Aditya Shekhar Nittala, and I will
be presenting our most recent work, Next
Steps in Epidermal Computing, which identifies opportunities
and challenges for soft on-skin devices.
Human skin is a fascinating interface
It's always available and it produces and
enables us to feel rich, tactile sensations.
We also have inherent proprioceptive capabilities, which
enables us to have a very sound
knowledge about 3D space around us.
And finally, human skin also acts as a biological
interface, which allows us to measure vital bio signals
that signify the state of our health.
These highly desirable properties are ideal for
building the next generation interactive devices and
immersive experiences leveraging the physical and perceptual
capabilities of our body.
And recent research in HCI has
been actively exploring novel ways to
augment human skin with interactive functionality.
These soft, highly skin conformal devices seamlessly and
intimately couple with our body, giving rise to
a new emerging field of computing.
And this new emerging field of
computing can be termed epidermal computing.
The vision for epidermal computing is to
intimately couple sensing computation and interaction to the outermost
layer of the human body, which is the
human skin or the epidermis.
And this epidermal computing is enabled
through an ecosystem of epidermal devices.
Epidermal devices are characterized
by the following properties.
First, they are very soft, they are noninvasive because of
which we do not feel their presence on our body.
They're highly stretchable and flexible, which allows them
to adapt to highly complex body geometries.
And finally, they are also bio-compatible.
In this work, we present the
first multidisciplinary analysis of epidermal devices
by systematically analyzing research in multiple
disciplines, journals and across publishing venues.
We compare and contrast research in epidermal
computing in HCI and physical sciences research
communities, and through this systematic comparison, we
identify opportunities and challenges for future research
in epidermal computing
Firstly, as part of our analysis, we identified
five core research teams for advancing this area.
They are materials, fabrication techniques, functionality of
devices, evaluation and empirical studies, and finally,
target applications for epidermal devices.
and challenges for each of these themes.
For our first theme, which is the materials
design of robust ultra thin materials and stretchable
conductors, is an opportunity that needs to be
very well explored, and similarly, safety and sustainability
are other areas that also need to be
focused for continuing research in this specific area.
To illustrate, this figure gives us a good picture of
the current state of the functional materials that are used
for fabricating the state of the art epidermal devices.
As you can see, most of the devices
which we are using currently fall on the
right end of the spectrum, where the devices
are stretchable and conductive to a limited extent.
However, the goal for the future research should
be to come up with new materials that
are highly stretchable and at the same time
should possess high electrical conductivity.
This can open up a broad variety of
applications and sensing opportunities for epidermal devices.
For our second theme, which is fabrication, we identified
that designing and coming up with new fabrication techniques
that allow for mass fabrication or fabrication of high
resolution devices or computational fabrication techniques is an open
research opportunity that needs to be explored, and fabrication
for large body areas is an exciting open challenge
that needs to be addressed and to go deeper
into one of these challenges.
Current HCI research has mostly focused on devices that
do not cover large areas of the body.
However, fabricating devices that cover large
body areas present challenges in fabrication,
interconnects and high stress levels.
There is preliminary and more recent research
in Physical Sciences community that's trying to
explore and tackle this specific problem.
Our third research theme is Functionality of
devices and in analyzing functionality of devices.
We have noticed that HCI community has
made rapid strides in creating devices with
novel input and output functionality, even in
devices that enable computing and communication.
We are testing devices in HCI community that
allow for computation on the Go and also
support wireless communication protocols, for example, NFC.
An active area of research is energy harvesting
where Physical Sciences community has already explored various
ways for harvesting energy, and this presents us
with open challenge where this could be a
promising area for investing our next research endeavors.
The fourth theme is Evaluation and empirical studies
and in this specific theme we identified that
studying interaction techniques, social acceptability and in-
-the-wild studies while analyzing interaction performance for
epidermal devices are still open research challenges that
need to be tackled and these are also
very important challenges because empirical studies enable us
to design interaction techniques for epidermal devices that
allow for natural ways for interaction on the
body and finally for application areas.
We identify assistive technologies and accessibility
as a very promising application area.
Epidermal devices can leverage our proprioceptive
capabilities to create accessible technologies that
seamlessly integrate with the body.
Similarly, sports and fitness, multisensory immersive
experiences, and affective human-robot interaction are
highly promising applications that need to
be explored and can serve as
target application areas for epidemic devices.
In this talk, I have presented our
work which systematically analyzes the research across
multiple disciplines and presents opportunities and challenges
for epidermal devices or soft on-skin devices.
We identified five core research themes which
are materials, fabrication, functionality of devices, evaluation
and empirical studies and application areas, and
highlighted possible opportunities and challenges for advancing
the research in epidermal computing.
With this, I will conclude my talk. Thank you.