Android application for the Hugginess project.
Physical contact has an important role in human well-being. Hugginess is a concept of interactive system that encourages people to hug by augmenting this gesture with digital information exchange.
The idea is to develop smart t-shirts able to detect, through conductive fibers and pressure detectors, when a hug occurs and to exchange some piece of information. The t-shirts should alors be able to communicate with an app in the user's smartphone using a bluetooth connection.
Since the objective of Hugginess is promoting physical touch, we strived to build a system that reflects the user’s need of physical contact. While existing projects that exchange information with a handshaking rely onwireless communication, we designed smart t-shirts that need physical contact in order to communicate properly. Moreover, Hugginess t-shirts can modulate the amount of information exchanged according to the length of the hug, but also to the social closeness of hugged person.
This project represents the first version of an Android application able to communicate with a Huggi-Shirt. The interface of the Huggi-Shirt consists of an Arduino LilyPad as well as a BlueSMIRF silver Bluetooth module.
This application is currently quite simple. It provides a specific bluetooth service as well as a sample application interface. The functionalities are:
- communication with the t-shirt
- storage of the hugs into a local database
- a terminal view, mostly for debugging
- a display of the list of hugs
- a "statistics" view, with the total number of hugs and the top three huggers
- some basic settings to configure the t-shirt
- ...
More information to come...