CHIIoT Group

Human-Centered Sustainable IoT Capstone Projects

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NFCe: Body-Centric Interaction with NFC Devices

PI: Rong-Hao Liang, TU/e

Researchers: Huizhong Ye (TU/e), Rong-Hao Liang (TU/e)

This project explores a sustainable way of faciliating human-centered interactions with IoT devices, smart environment, and others using passive NFC extenders worn on users’ body with a smartphone. Banner

Abstract

The application of interactive technology seems to be more and more inseparable from smartphones, so many times we have to take out mobile phones to interact, such as NFC-based interaction. In this project, we proposed a body-centric interaction design space, and a design of wearable NFC relays that enable body-centric interactions for a commodity near-field communication (NFC) device. The passive extenders worn on the body can extend the operating range of the NFC reader/writer of a smartphone to the reach of the wearer’s hand, arm, or foot. These NFC devices can capture the near-field interactions between the human body and NFC-tagged objects. We explored the design space and elucidated the applications in human-computer interaction as well as IoT lifestyle. Our implementation demonstrated the proposed applications’ technical feasibility and aroused more ideas in the co-creation workshop to be generated. We also release an open-source library called OpenNFCSense, a system for detecting the movements of near-field communication (NFC) tags using a commodity, low-cost RC522 NFC reader. With a user-defined tag profile, the users can use its application programming interface (API) to obtain the NFC tagged objects’ motion speed, motion frequency, and motion type while recognizing these tagged objects.

Acknowledgments

This project was partially supported by the 4TU.NIRICT community funding. Logos