Publications

Selected Publications

This page shows selected publications from the last years. For a detailed list please refer to the Google Scholar or DBLP page of Stefan Schneegass.

Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

Cruise Control for Pedestrians: Controlling Walking Direction using Electrical Muscle Stimulation

Author(s):
Max Pfeiffer, Tim Dünte; Stefan Schneegass, Florian Alt; Rohs, Michael
Title of Anthology:
In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15)
pages:
2505-2514
Publisher:
ACM
Location(s):
New York, USA
Publication Date:
2015
ISBN:
978-1-4503-3145-6
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):
doi:10.1145/2702123.2702190
Citation:
Download BibTeX

Abstract

Pedestrian navigation systems require users to perceive, interpret, and react to navigation information. This can tax cognition as navigation information competes with information from the real world. We propose actuated navigation, a new kind of pedestrian navigation in which the user does not need to attend to the navigation task at all. An actuation signal is directly sent to the human motor system to influence walking direction. To achieve this goal we stimulate the sartorius muscle using electrical muscle stimulation. The rotation occurs during the swing phase of the leg and can easily be counteracted. The user therefore stays in control. We discuss the properties of actuated navigation and present a lab study on identifying basic parameters of the technique as well as an outdoor study in a park. The results show that our approach changes a user's walking direction by about 16°/m on average and that the system can successfully steer users in a park with crowded areas, distractions, obstacles, and uneven ground.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSfnm_HoUv4