Odysseus

Imagine a world where everytime you shook someones hand your devices could keep track of the who, what, when and why of the situation for later use?

Maintaining one's social network has evolved from the days of little black books, piles of business cards, phone books or just relying on your memory. New ways of maintaining and engaging with ones professional or personal social networks have emerged. For example, systems including Bebo, LinkedIn or Facebook allow you to remotely stay in touch with contacts, friends and family. These sites offer features to automate the improvement of social networks: Facebook automatically detects and suggests a list of possible new friends among your friends’ friends while linked in and other can scape ones mail account for new contacts. These are examples of software being used to help document, maintaining and improve the completeness or freshness of ones social networks.

In this project, we aim to introduce some novel hardware solutions in order to achieve similar goals. If one’s word is their bond and with the shake of a hand we agree to a deal, then why not enable the automatic collection of new contacts by ones interaction with the physical world? Instead of just relying on scraping or pro-active online requests?

The simple ritual of a handshake dates back over 2000 years. With simple sensing why not keep track of such events and use them to power data collection? Several types of devices can be considered here. First, the usability of devices such as Shimmers will be studied (http://www.shimmer-research.com/) in order to detect physical contact between people. Shimmer is a device containing an accelerometer and is able to store and wirelessly communicate the data it records. Shimmer is compact enough and can be worn on a wrist for instance. While today this is a dedicated device we can already see such sensors built into phones and perhaps wrist watches of the future?

One goal of the project will be to study the usability of accelerometer data for the detection and matching of simultaneous handshakes. Simple sensors could allow you to build up your social network with the shake of a hand or the slap of a back. Clearly other gestures could also allow one to prune ones social network.

In this project other devices such as iPhones, PDAs and smart phones could also be used in conjunction to Shimmer. Smart phones make it possible to wirelessly exchange information via protocols such as Bluetooth. Bluetooth communication is only possible in a short range (around 10m), making sure that two devices exchange information only if they are located close to each other. Such sensing is another way in which to detect that two people are collocated.

Many other approaches to determining ones social network can be explored in this project. One avenue for this project is to study the feasibility of combining (fusing) data from several devices in order to automatically send friend requests on Facebook to two people who are not friends yet but who shoke hands, spoke for a period of time, attended the same meeting etc. During this project, intermediary solutions can be considered (e.g. no use of smart phones in a first place). Also, other types of motions can be considered as well as other devices with the aim to help automate the maintenance of social networks.

This project requires a student with strong programming skills and no fear of dealing with hardware and realtime signal processing and sensing. The project is designed to allow a student to devlop the concept as they wish with an early prototype (week 1) expected based on the use of the biomobius.org platform for proof of concept, followed by research and development on robust and novel gesture and network formation.