ABSTRACT
In the last decade, we have seen an increase in the use cases of digital technologies in our daily lives, including advanced systems such as our mobile applications, smart digital kiosks for intelligent retailing, touch screens for ordering food, or simple implementations such as the ticket machines in the butchers. However, from the perspective of interaction design, those sensing systems suffer from a range of limitations like low usability and poor hygiene. For example, the elderly or the disabled normally have huge difficulties when interacting with these types of digital systems. Moreover, the recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made us to rethink the contact manner for interaction with the digital devices. Hence, in this paper, we have presented a novel solution for digital interaction through a contactless manner. Such a system can provide human gesture recognition and therefore it can be integrated into others to achieve contactless control. We have implemented a prototype based on cost efficient sensors to validate the idea’s feasibility. A sequence of real world experiments has also been conducted to evaluate its performance. This system is composed with 1) piece of hardware–a grid of ultrasound sensors to capture the distance information from a human body;2) a piece of software to analyse the data for gesture predictions. The analysis results then will be transformed into control commands to interact with the attached system. The experimental results have shown that the proposed system is capable of providing a contactless Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and also has a great opportunity to replace existing touching interaction manner with a remote control scheme. CCBY