Created by Pedro Lopes, Doğa Yüksel, François Guimbretière, and Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institut, Muscle-Plotter is an assistive interface that allows hand-drawn computation using EMS muscles actuation.

It is a sort of invisible computer because it uses your body as the interface. The idea here is we want user’s to be able work on complex problems and exciting tasks (such as sketching a car and testing it on a wind tunnel simulator) without needing an full computer with screens and keyboards.

Using pen-on-paper interaction, muscle-plotter allows users to engage in cognitively demanding activities, such as writing math. Users write formulas using a pen and the system responds by making the users’ hand draw charts and widgets. While Anoto technology in the pen tracks users’ input, muscle-plotter uses electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) to steer the user’s wrist so as to plot charts, fit lines through data points, find data points of interest, or fill in forms.

Their research will be presented on Monday at ACM UIST’16 in Tokyo also with a live demo. It is also available as open source on GitHub.

Programming environment: Python using OpenCV, OSC, Arduino and SciPy libraries.

Project Page |  Pedro Lopes | Doga Yueksel | François Guimbretière | Patrick Baudisch