Contribution from the Ubicomp Lab at the University of Washington
Published in
5 min readNov 7, 2022
Ubicomp Lab at the University of Washington made great contributions to modern-day ubicomp systems. In this article, we will explore the research and development of interface technology, health sensing, activity recognition, and human-computer interaction. This research intuition is better known for creating ubicomp systems that heavily rely on sensory technology. Based on their inventions, they are an interdisciplinary area of focus in computer science where they solve real-world problems today within the health industry.
There seems to be a huge focus on checking for health via a sensor on vital signs. The university is considering constantly checking the current health of a user without the user really realizing it and making healthcare more available. What does it mean to make healthcare more available? To think this through, many Americans need to go to a doctor to check the patient’s vitals and to check if there is anything wrong. Doctors tend to use technology to do this anyway, however, Doctors tend to charge patients hundreds or even thousands of dollars just to check vitals. Sometimes patients must do this annually just to keep track of their health and to see if there’s anything wrong. However, with the University of Washington approach, they can use ubicomp technology to constantly check on the user’s health every second of every day, through watches for example. Yes, watches are expensive up front, but in the long term on how long they last, they could save the user thousand of dollars and keep track of their health more often than a yearly doctor visit.
The University of Washington is also looking into analyzing users’ behavior and trend in certain health factors. This is interesting because based on those trends ubicomp technology can detect a potential danger to the user’s health based on historical trends and maybe send in an alert to the user that they might be at risk of any potential health hazards based on their behavior.
The University of Washington is also looking into environmental sensing where they can analyze trends like what was mentioned in the last paragraph, but also do it within the environment when it comes to predicting natural disasters and the dangers of climate change. They are thinking of doing this through cameras to “combat unnecessary energy consumption and detect natural disasters related to climate change.” With all this in mind, we are going to look into three different research blogs done by the University of Washington to have a better understanding of how they are contributing to the ubicomp industry.
One study is titled “Passively Sensing SARS-CoV-2 RNA in Public Transit Buses. “To elaborate, this means that the bus HVAC systems will have a sensor within the AC filters. This sensor will sense any COVID-19 RNA strands. This is done in the city of Seattle, Washington. This is very useful because buses in Seattle have GPS locators on them already. The HVAC sensors will sense any type of COVID RNA in the air inside the bus, which then will alert health officials of COVID-19 trends within geolocational areas. This will help health experts in COVID breakouts and trends and will help experts to learn more about the virus. This is useful for policymakers too to see how bad the covid cases are going in certain areas and to make informed policy-making decisions based on COVID data from the HAVAC sensors. This will also track the spread of COVID-19 via certain routes the bus is taking, and they can develop a prediction model to forecast other outbreaks in other areas based on which bus routes are infected and how widespread the infection is. This is also ubicomp because the people within the buses have no idea they are even there, and the sensor is still doing their jobs without the people in the buses noticing.
Figure 1 (source: https://ubicomplab.cs.washington.edu/publications/covid_bus/)
The next title is called “LuckyChirp: Opportunistic Respiration Sensing Using Cascaded Sonar on Commodity Devices.” This is where a device (either cell phone, google nest, or amazon echo) will monitor the user’s respiration using sonar sensing. This is done by the user installing the app on their phone and pressing start so that whatever device is configured to the app can monitor the user’s respiration, then the device will send that data to the servers and monitor the user’s respiration health. The app can also tell if the user is watching tv, reading a book, or even taking a nap. This is useful for users who are concerned with their respiratory health but don’t want to invest a whole bunch of money into a doctor for it, they can substitute it with this piece of technology, and it is in a way ubicomp because it is already integrated with a user’s existing device.
Figure 2 (source: https://ubicomplab.cs.washington.edu/publications/luckychirp/)
The last title we are going to explore will be “FaceOri: Tracking Head Position and Orientation Using Ultrasonic Ranging on Earphones.” This technology is also integrated technology. This is integrated within the microphones of the headset the user is wearing. What it will do? It will find out the user’s facial orientation to the device that the user is also using. Think of this as the headset is measuring the face orientation of the user in relation to their cell phone. This is done by the microphone sending ultrasonic waves to the device and measuring the different angles to understand the orientation of the user’s face to the cell phone. This is useful in the sense that it is more of a stepping stone for the evolution of hand-free technology and to “produce more intelligent context-aware interactions.”
