Wireless communications are ubiquitous nowadays, especially in the new era of Internet of Things (IoT). Most of IoT devices access the Internet via some kind of wireless connections. The major role of wireless signals is a type of communication medium. Besides that, taking advantage of the growing physical layer capabilities of wireless techniques, recent research has demonstrated the possibility of reusing wireless signals for both communication and sensing. The capability of wireless sensing and the ubiquitous availability of wireless signals make it possible to meet the rising demand of pervasive environment perception. Physical layer features including signal attributes and channel state information (CSI) can be used for the purpose of physical world sensing. This dissertation focuses on exploring the sensing capability of wireless signals. The research approach is to first take measurements from physical layer of wireless connections, and then develop various techniques to extract or infer information about the environment from the measurements, like the locations of signal sources, the motion of human body, etc. The research work in this dissertation makes three contributions. We start from wireless signal attributes analysis. Specifically, the cyclostationarity properties of wireless signals are studied. Taking WiFi signals as an example, we propose signal cyclostationarity models induced by WiFi Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) structure including pilots, cyclic prefix, and preambles. The induced cyclic frequencies is then applied to the signal-selective direction estimation problem. Second, based on the analysis of wireless signal attributes, we design and implement a prototype of a single device system, named MobTrack, which can locate indoor interfering radios. The goal of designing MobTrack is to provide a lightweight, handhold system that can locate interfering radios with sub-meter accuracy with as few antennas as possible. With a small antenna array, the cost, complexity as well as size of this device are reduced. MobTrack is the first single device indoor interference localization system without the requirement of multiple pre-deployed access points (AP). Third, channel state information is studied in applications of human motion sensing. We design WiTalk, the first system which is able to do fine-grained motion sensing like leap reading on smartphones using the CSI dynamics generated by human movements. WiTalk proposes a new fine-grained human motion sensing technique with the distinct context-free feature. To achieve this goal using CSI, WiTalk generates CSI spectrograms using signal processing techniques and extracts features by calculating the contours of the CSI spectrograms. The proposed technique is verified in the application scenario of lip reading, where the fine-grained motion is the mouth movements. / Ph. D.

This thesis develops and presents a design methodology that enables designers to work with the moving body in the design and evaluation of interactive, immersive environments built on motion-sensing technologies. The notion of making strange, that underpins the methodology, calls for designers to re-examine and revitalise their assumptions and conceptions of the moving body through bodily-based movement inquiries. This thesis addresses research questions about ways of understanding human movement, of describing and representing human movement and of accessing the felt experience of the moving body in the emerging field of movement-based interaction design. The research questions were explored through a series of three distinct, yet related, projects, each one focusing on different aspects of designing for moving bodies in interactive, immersive environments. The first project analysed an existing interactive product, Sony Playstation2c EyetoyTM, as a prototype of future movement-based interactive, immersive environments. The second project involved the design and development of a specific interactive, immersive artwork, Bystander. The third project worked with trained dancers and physical performers in a constructed design situation. The contributions of this research are first and foremost the design methodology of Moving and Making Strange: a design approach to movement-based interaction that prioritises the lived experience of movement by both designers and users and values the creative potential of the experiential, moving body. It consists of methods and tools for exploring, experiencing, describing, representing and generating movement that enable designers to shift between the multiple perspectives of the mover, the observer and the machine. It makes particular contributions as follows: • Laban movement analysis and Labanotation as a design tool. • Moving-Sensing schema: Suchman’s analytic framework adapted as a design tool. • Extension of existing human-centred design tools to explicitly represent moving bodies, in the form of movement-oriented personas and movementoriented scenarios. • Patterns of watching: a catalogue of audience behaviour in terms of movements and stillness in relation to engagement with a specific interactive, immersive artwork. • New methods for generating, enacting and experiencing movement, sourced from dance and movement improvisation practices.

This thesis develops and presents a design methodology that enables designers to work with the moving body in the design and evaluation of interactive, immersive environments built on motion-sensing technologies. The notion of making strange, that underpins the methodology, calls for designers to re-examine and revitalise their assumptions and conceptions of the moving body through bodily-based movement inquiries. This thesis addresses research questions about ways of understanding human movement, of describing and representing human movement and of accessing the felt experience of the moving body in the emerging field of movement-based interaction design. The research questions were explored through a series of three distinct, yet related, projects, each one focusing on different aspects of designing for moving bodies in interactive, immersive environments. The first project analysed an existing interactive product, Sony Playstation2c EyetoyTM, as a prototype of future movement-based interactive, immersive environments. The second project involved the design and development of a specific interactive, immersive artwork, Bystander. The third project worked with trained dancers and physical performers in a constructed design situation. The contributions of this research are first and foremost the design methodology of Moving and Making Strange: a design approach to movement-based interaction that prioritises the lived experience of movement by both designers and users and values the creative potential of the experiential, moving body. It consists of methods and tools for exploring, experiencing, describing, representing and generating movement that enable designers to shift between the multiple perspectives of the mover, the observer and the machine. It makes particular contributions as follows: • Laban movement analysis and Labanotation as a design tool. • Moving-Sensing schema: Suchman’s analytic framework adapted as a design tool. • Extension of existing human-centred design tools to explicitly represent moving bodies, in the form of movement-oriented personas and movementoriented scenarios. • Patterns of watching: a catalogue of audience behaviour in terms of movements and stillness in relation to engagement with a specific interactive, immersive artwork. • New methods for generating, enacting and experiencing movement, sourced from dance and movement improvisation practices.

Wi-Fi Sensing is becoming a prominent field with a wide range of potential applications. Using existing hardware on a wireless network such as access points, cell phones, and smart home devices, important information can be inferred about the current physical environment. Through the analysis of Channel State Information collected in the Neighborhood Discovery Protocol process, the wireless network can detect disturbances in Wi-Fi signals when the physical environment changes. This results in a system that can sense motion within the Wi-Fi network, allowing for movement detection without any wearable devices. The goal of this thesis is to answer whether Wi-Fi Sensing can enable useful applications at the enterprise level. The main applications we will focus on are presence detection and in-zone movement detection. Our contributions include: 1. A scalable, statistical analysis system that generates a heatmap and detects movement in a 12 x 9 meter zone with 98 percent accuracy, as well as a 6 x 9 meter zone with 88 percent accuracy. 2. A broad dataset collected for evaluation in an enterprise setting. 3. An end-to-end CSI data visualization and analysis application.

Ship-mounted boom cranes play an important role in the ship-to-ship offshore cargo transport process. In recent years, there has been significant need to increase stability of the payload during the cargo transport process for both safety and efficiency reasons. However, the stability of the payload during the transport process directly correlates to the ship's pitch and roll motion that in turn relates to the current particular sea-state. In this study, we analyze an existing Pendulation Control System (PCS) developed by Sandia National Laboratories that reduces the payload's pendulation movement during transport. This system measures the ship motion through a complex inertial navigation system using an IMU and dual GPS receivers. In trying to simplify the analysis of the IMU sensor, we simulate new control solutions based solely on an IMU-only ship motion measurement system using both position- and velocity-based controllers. This study shows that an optional bandpass filter in the new control solution can reject a bias that appears in the estimated accelerometer data at the expense of higher sensitivity for the control. This study also shows that the velocity-based solution provides comparable if not better results than the position-based solution. Both methods are sensitive to the difference between the ship motion period and the center frequency of its bandpass filter. Lastly, it is shown that the bias of an accelerometer is not a large source of payload disturbance as compared to the scale factor error. / Master of Science

Physiotherapy is a key part of treatment for neurological and musculoskeletal disorders, which affect millions in the U.S. each year. Physical therapy treatments typically consist of an initial diagnostic session during which patients’ impairments are assessed and exercises are prescribed to improve the impaired functions. As part of the treatment program, exercises are often assigned to be performed at home daily. Patients return to the clinic weekly or biweekly for check-up visits during which the physical therapist reassesses their condition and makes further treatment decisions, including readjusting the exercise prescriptions. Most physical therapists work in clinics or hospitals. When patients perform their exercises at home, physical therapists cannot supervise them and lack quantitative exercise data reflecting the patients’ exercise compliance and performance. Without this information, it is difficult for physical therapists to make informed decisions or treatment adjustments. To make informed decisions, physical therapists need to know how often patients exercise, the duration and/or repetitions of each session, exercise metrics such as the average velocities and ranges of motion for each exercise, patients’ symptom levels (e.g. pain or dizziness) before and after exercise, and what mistakes patients make. In this thesis, I evaluate and work towards a solution to this problem. The growing ubiquity of mobile and wearable technology makes possible the development of “virtual rehabilitation assistants.” Using motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes that are embedded in a wearable device, the “assistant” can mediate between patients at home and physical therapists in the clinic. Its functions are to:  use motion sensors to record home exercise metrics for compliance and performance and report these metrics to physical therapists in real-time or periodically;  allow physical therapists and patients to quantify and see progress on a fine-grain level;  record symptom levels to further help physical therapists gauge the effectiveness of exercise prescriptions;  offer real-time mistake recognition and feedback to the patients during exercises; One contribution of this thesis is an evaluation of the feasibility of this idea in real home settings. Because there has been little research on wearable virtual assistants in patient homes, there are many unanswered questions regarding their use and usefulness: Q1. What patient in-home data could wearable virtual assistants gather to support physical therapy treatments? Q2. Can patient data gathered by virtual assistants be useful to physical therapists? 3 Q3. How is this wearable in-home technology received by patients? I sought to answer these questions by implementing and deploying a prototype called “SenseCap.” SenseCap is a small mobile device worn on a ball cap that monitors patients’ exercise movements and queries them about their symptoms. A technology probe study showed that the virtual assistant could gather important compliance, performance, and symptom data to assist physical therapists’ decision-making, and that this technology would be feasible and acceptable for in-home use by patients. Another contribution of this thesis is the development of a tool to allow physical therapists to create and customize virtual assistants. With current technology, virtual assistants require engineering and programming efforts to design, implement, configure and deploy them. Because most physical therapists do not have access to an engineering team they and their patients would be unable to benefit from this technology. With the goal of making virtual assistants accessible to any physical therapist, I explored the following research questions: Q4. Would a user-friendly rule-specification interface make it easy for physical therapists to specify correct and incorrect exercise movements directly to a computer? What are the limitations of this method of specifying exercise rules? Q5. Is it possible to create a CAD-type authoring tool, based on a usable interface, that physical therapists could use to create their own customized virtual assistant for monitoring and coaching patients? What are the implementation details of such a system and the resulting virtual assistant? Q6. What preferences do PTs have regarding the delivery of coaching feedback for patients? Q7. What is the recognition accuracy of a virtual rehabilitation assistant created by this tool? This dissertation research aims to improve our understanding of the barriers to rehabilitation that occur because of the invisibility of home exercise behavior, to lower these barriers by making it possible for patients to use a widely-available and easily-used wearable device that coaches and monitors them while they perform their exercises, and improve the ability of physical therapists to create an exercise regime for their patients and to learn what patients have done to perform these exercises. In doing so, treatment should be better suited to each patient and more successful.

The area of the research comprises the field of virtualization as specified to the field of three-dimensional user interfaces (3D UIs). It is an approach of applying the field of motion-sensing technology to potential areas of apparel value chains focusing on design. The background of this thesis is the industry’s established 3D design and development process and new digital tools that enable embodied interaction. So far companies are still working with a limited 3D design approach, which requires several non-value-adding activities, e.g. technical sketching and pattern creation, before a product can be virtually simulated and evaluated. As the current fashion industry’s human-computer interaction (HCI) applications have non-embodied interaction technologies, which deny natural hand movements, it was evaluated, if motion-sensing technology can enable the feeling of natural handcrafting. The purpose of the project was to investigate the designer’s attitude towards motion-sensing technology as a design tool and the potential of embodied HCI in design and development processes of apparel value chains. Enabling the designer the feeling of handcrafting in a 3D world opens a new area of research within the use of 3D fashion design tools. Moreover the thesis expected to prove the desire towards embodied interaction during the apparel design and development processes and the designer’s openness to try out new things. To fulfill the purpose, the motion-sensing technology tool Leap Motion was used as a practical device, which enables embodied interaction in design applications. A team of various designers was used to conduct a practical experiment, combined with interviews and observations. The experiment has been analysed on the designer’s attitude towards the use of a motion-sensing technology tool within the design field and possible implications on the design and development phases of apparel value chains. The results show, that the designers supported embodied interaction and experienced the use of motion-sensing technology as an enhancing and powerful tool. However, it has become clear that the designers experienced the usage of free-handed motion-sensing technology as not natural or intuitive and rather prefer tangible tools. Presupposing a crucial improvement of the technology, different ways of substituting current design activities like enabling the draping process on a virtual basis could enhance the value chain regarding speed, flexibility and waste. This would enable earlier entry into the evaluation stage of virtual simulated prototypes while directly starting the design and development process in 3D and reducing several iterations of non-value adding activities.

With the continued expansion of the market share of video games and the growing numberof obese people in recent years, public and business interests in exercise games have been aroused. The period when exercise games emerged maybe can be counted down from AtariPuffer. In 1982, Atari created a home exercycle with two-hand grip controllers, a wheel speedpickup, and the necessary attachment for an Atari computer or 5200. Then following this breakthrough, a lot of new types of equipment combined with video games and fitness popped up. Among those new consoles, Nintendo Wii is one of the best sellers. Then after Wii Sports, a more comprehensive and professional exercise game, Ring Fit Adventure, came out in 2019. It sold around 10,110,000 copies until March 2021. Furthermore, over7.38 million came from April 2020 to March 2021 alone. (Resource from the Fiscal Year Ended March 2021 Financial Results Explanatory Material Nintendo Co., Ltd. May 6, 2021) This thesis aims to find more detailed reasons to explain why people start playing exercise games and how exercise games change their lives. Because all of the participants are Chinese, the conclusions drawn in this thesis may have some geographical characteristics. Although in China, there is still only a tiny percentage of people playing exercise games in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other reasons, this is a new trend that cannot be ignored.

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Context. Both smartphones and PC games are increasingly commonplace nowadays. There are more and more people who own smartphones and – at the same time – like playing video games. Since the smartphones are becoming widely affordable and offer more and more advanced features (such as multi-touch screens, a variety of sensors, vibration feedback, and others), it is justifiable to study their potential in new application areas. The aim of this thesis is to adapt the smartphone for the use as a game controller in PC racing games and evaluate this solution taking into account such aspects as race results and user experience. Objectives. To this end, two applications were developed - a game controller application for Android‑based smartphones (i.e. the client application) and a PC server application. The applications support a selected open-source PC racing game called SuperTuxKart. The evaluation of the smartphone encompasses both race results (whether the smartphone enables players to achieve comparable results to the keyboard – a standard game controller) and user experience (whether this game controller may be satisfying to players). Methods. An experiment was conducted where 20 participants controlled the SuperTuxKart game using first the smartphone, and then the keyboard or vice versa. The experiment was followed by a questionnaire-based survey of the user experience. Results. The experiment results indicate that the smartphone may achieve results which are comparable to those achieved by the keyboard. The race times corresponding to the smartphone were somewhat longer than those obtained with the keyboard, but the average relative difference was below 18%. The questionnaire results show that more than half of the participants enjoyed the smartphone more than the keyboard, despite the fact that the smartphone turned out to be a more challenging game controller for many players and did not provide so good control of the racing game as the keyboard. Conclusions. Overall, this study shows that the smartphone has a potential to be a suitable, satisfying and enjoyable controller for PC racing games.