HCIL Brown Bag Speaker Series: Alex Leitch & Celia Chen (January 2024)

The HCIL Brown Bag Speaker Series runs every Thursday during the Spring and Fall semesters. We bring in speakers from UMD and all around the world to share their research with the community. For more information on these events and more, see hcil.umd.edu.
***
Talk Title: Strain: Myoelectric Sculpture Control with the Thalmic Myo Armband
Abstract: Novel HCI devices are prone to planned obsolescence, which sometimes causes clever ideas and great sensor packages to be trashed before being thoroughly explored. This is a particular problem in closed-source hardware designed with strongly opinionated interfaces. The Myo armband by Thalmic Labs packed high-grade EMG sensors into a successful, compact wearable, before being discontinued in 2018. This talk covers how we repurposed a Myo armband to take advantage of its subtle muscle tracking to activate a pneumatic sculpture made from materials that are similarly regarded as junk in the making. This creative hacking approach is a promising way to thwart planned obsolescence, which is especially important when it comes to HCI and accessibility devices.
By interfacing a Myo to a Raspberry Pi 3B+, we enabled forearm muscles to trigger air valves and animate assemblies of latex, bamboo, and PLA. These forms were then programmed to maintain peristalsis, only to dramatically deflate and flop about in response to custom gesture control. Though the interactions aim more for surprise and delight than technical polish, this comedy of errors examines the latent expressiveness of both the obsolete Myo hardware and everyday trash. It also allowed us to explore which software systems, exactly, would be required to take further advantage of the Myo system in an open-hardware environment. By finding fresh ways to work with what’s on our shelves, we hope to squeeze more value from devices otherwise destined for landfills.