Dewey

Description

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During my (unfinished) Graduate studies I was chosen by Professor Selma Šabanovic to participate in a research project inspired by a class project I took titled "Human-Robot Interaction." I was chosen to participate in this project as the team's developer due to my experience in designing and developing physical prototypes using the Arduino microcontroller as a platform.

This research project aimed to determine whether or not certain kinds of robots using certain Human-Robot Interaction design concepts (such as embodiment) could increase the amount of stress-reducing breaks office workers took per day. This project was both interesting and challenging because there were no tried-and-true methods published and documented for detecting the presence of a person at his or her desk.

During this project, my main contributions were:

• Designed and Constructed (chose and procured parts, soldered, glued, duct taped) the hardware for a fully-functional, network-connected presence sensing and logging (detected whether a participant was at his or her desk or not)
• Designed a backend using PHP and MySQL that the presence sensing platform connected to to log presence data for the study
• Designed and developed algorithms that analyzed the data collected from participants to judge when users were at their desk based on motion and temperature values collected by the sensing platform
• Designed and developed real-time reports accessible by other researchers on project using PHP and the algorithms and data mentioned above