Consumed Endurance (CE) – Measuring Arm Fatigue during Mid-Air Interactions

If you are working on mid-air interactions or hand gestures for interacting remotely with a computer, or for creating the next augmented reality (AR) gadget, then you will certainly encounter that your novel hand-wavvy mid-air ironman-like interface is REALLY tiresome. And that’s no small problem. Known as the gorilla arm effect, this phenomenon was one of the obstacles for the adoption of the early touch interfaces.

At the CHI 2014 conference in Toronto, we will presenting our research on how to measure arm fatigue in an non-obtrusive and quantitative manner. Our metric is called consumed endurance, and build’s on Rohmert’s biomechanical studies of endurance time of the upper limbs [1]. Endurance time is defined as the maximum amount of time that a muscle can maintain a contraction level before needing rest. Our metric, called Consumed Endurance (CE), is defined as the ratio between the interaction time and the available endurance time. The following video is a nice preview of our upcoming presentation at CHI.

Please check the [project page] for more information.

Citation

• Hincapié-Ramos, J.D., Guo, X., Moghadasian P., and Irani, P. 2014. Consumed Endurance: A Metric to Quantify Arm Fatigue of Mid-Air Interactions. In Proc. CHI 2014, May 2014, Toronto, Canada. [pdf (1.0MB)]

Downloads

• Consumed Endurance (CE) Workbench [download]