This report describes the work method, conclusions and result of my Master Degree in Advanced Product Design at Umeå Institute of Design. The project lasted 17 weeks and took place in spring 2013. The project was carried out in collaboration with Atlas Copco. The main purpose of this project is to explore the future of handheld demolition tools and how to carry out this extremely physically demanding work in an ergonomic and effortless way, while keeping productivity high and complexity low. I will look into the area of robotics, compact machines, and exoskeletons to get inspiration for supportive structures that could potentially semi- or fully automate some of the strenuous movements of today’s work, while trying to incorporate features to solve some of the other problematic aspects like the hazardous silica and asbestos dust spreading in the air and/or detecting hidden pipes and cables to avoid unnecessary interior damages. The result will be a conceptual product meant for the future market of 2025.6

The long term purpose of this project is to reduce the attention demand of drivers whenusing infotainment systems in a car setting. With the development of the car industry,a contradiction between safety issue and entertainment demands in cars has arisen.Speech-recognition-based controls meet their bottleneck in the presence of backgroundaudio (such as engine noise, other passengers speech and/or the infotainment systemitself). We propose a new method to control the infotainment system using computervision technology in this thesis. This project uses algorithms of object detection, opticalflow(estimated motion) and feature analysis to build a communication channel betweenhuman and machine. By tracking the driver’s head and measuring the optical flow overthe lip region, the driver’s mouth feature can be indicated. Performance concerning theefficiency and accuracy of the system is analyzed. The contribution of this thesis is toprovide a method using facial gestures to communicate with the system, and we focuson the movement of lips especially. This method offers a possibility to create a new modeof interaction between human and machine.