PneuMa: Designing Pneumatic Bodily Extensions for Supporting Movement in Everyday Life

Abstract

Prior research around the design of interactive systems has highlighted the benefits of supporting embodiment in everyday life. This resulted in the creation of body-centric systems that leverage movement. However, these advances supporting movement in everyday life, aligning with the embodiment theory, so far focused on sensing movement as opposed to facilitating movement. We present PneuMa, a novel wearable system that can facilitate movement in everyday life through pneumatic-based bodily extensions. We showcase the system through three examples: "Pardon?", moving the ear forward; "Greetings", moving a hand towards the "Bye-bye" gesture; "Take a break", moving the hands away from the keyboard, enabling the bodily extensions that support movement in everyday life. We delve into some findings in relation to prior research around bodily extensions and embodied interaction in the video. Ultimately, we hope that our work helps more people profit from the benefits of everyday movement support.

Authors

Aryan Saini, Rakesh Patibanda, Nathalie Overdevest, Elise Van Den Hoven, Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller

Keywords

Collaborators