Smatable: A System to Transform Furniture into Interface using Vibration Sensor

Abstract

Recently, with the spread of smart houses, the smartness of housing equipment and home appliances has progressed, and the functionality and usability of interfaces between people and equipment and between people and home appliances have become important factors. Currently, the main interfaces are remote controls, smartphone applications, and even voice recognition. Furthermore, research is also being conducted on interfaces that can be operated without having the device at hand using cameras and radio waves. However, special equipment must be installed for operation, and compatibility with room design has become an issue. In this research, we proposed a system to transform existing furniture into an interface rather than providing a new interface. The proposed system focused on vibration sensors that are small, inexpensive, and can be attached to existing furniture or hidden from view. To evaluate the proposed system, an experiment was conducted to transform existing furniture into an interface for swiping by simply attaching the vibration sensor to the existing furniture. Specifically, the system attaches four vibration sensors with synchronized output signals to a table and uses a CNN to learn the vibration data obtained from the sensors to predict the direction of the swipe. As a result, when the table and person swiping were fixed, the system could predict the swipe with an accuracy of over 0.86.