Researchers at MIT have developed a new tactile sensing carpet that will be capable of estimating human poses without requiring a camera. The team behind the idea believes this is a step towards improving self-powered personalized healthcare, smart homes, and gaming. Researchers note that most people’s daily activities involve physical contact with the ground, for instance, exercise, resting, or walking.
These interactions provide information that might help understand the movement of people. Research done in the past included RGB cameras, wearable omnidirectional cameras, and conventional WebCams. Systems that use cameras raise privacy concerns.
No cameras, no privacy issues
MIT researchers only required cameras to create the data set to train their system and only capture the movement of the person performing the activity. Once fully trained, the system was able to identify the 3D pose of a person by only requiring them to get on the carpet and perform the activity.
The deep neural network developed by the team leverages tactile information to figure out what activity the person is performing. The carpet packs commercial pressure-sensitive film and conductive thread and is also cost-effective. The carpet measures 36 by two feet and comprises over 9000 sensors inside. Each sensor converts the pressure applied to them into an electrical signal.
No more injuries while exercising alone
The new system can come in handy for computerized exercise regimes such as showing a video of a person performing sit-ups if the user gets on the carpet and starts doing sit-ups. This will enable people who train alone at their homes to understand proper form and technique to avoid injuries while working out. Researchers also say that if the carpet is used for the only exercise, it could also calculate the number of calories burned during the workout.
MIT researchers also recently developed a new kind of stent inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami. The same idea has been used to develop a stent that can deliver drugs payloads to places inside the human body such as the G.I. tract, respiratory tract, or other tubular organs.
