Automated cars hold the promise of raising the comfort, increasing security, reducing congestion as well as environmental impact of driving. Despite the potential advantages of car automation, such autonomous vehicles raise a number of issues with respect to human factors.
The main goal of the project is to study how human-vehicle interfaces can be designed to be operated at different levels of attention (focused, peripheral and implicit interaction) in shared control driving to keep the driver at the optimum cognitive load. We believe that the car of the future will be “our companion” and the driver and the system will work as team-members in order to complement each-other for managing the driving tasks and dynamically sharing responsibilities according to the context (e.g., technical limitations of the system, user state and fitness to drive, driving conditions, etc.)..

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The aim of this project is the development of personalised services, which enable individuals, from the younger to the elder population, to become co-producers of their health and main-tain good health status. This will include: (i) a "virtual individual" model, which comprises the personal characteristics of an individual (e.g. personal profile, preconditions, risk factors, unhealthy behaviours, preferences, physical activity, sleep, mental status etc.); (ii) advanced sensors to acquire data on lifestyle aspects, behaviour and surrounding environment; (iii) intelligent systems for recognition of behavioural trends and prediction or early detection of health risks on the basis of heterogeneous data, including data acquired by sensors and indi-vidual self assessment; (iv) a supportive environment to engineer awareness about healthy behaviours, offer personalised guidance and provide support to behavioural change; (v) de-velopment of a new ecosystem of stakeholders, engaging also actors such as fitness, food and lighting industry, schools, health insurance companies, policy makers and media; (vi) innovation in organisational models and business models for ICT-enabled disease preven-tion. PEGASO is a 4-year FP7 IP project, which regroups about 15 academic and industrial European partners .

iNUIT is a 8-year research program aiming at developing a technological ‘backbone’ for tomorrow’s city, based on the new paradigm of the Internet of Things. Eighteen projects have been set up focusing on this theme. Every one of them, ranging from the design of sensors to data analysis, is aimed at developing technologies which will reliably link the virtual world with the physical world. Street lighting, transport and parking, safety of people, health services – the range of potential fields of application is unlimited. As modern cities are extremely rich and complex environments, iNUIT initially turned its attention to the major events (festivals, political summits, sports events) which proliferate in Switzerland and has established a collaboration with the Paléo Festival Nyon and the Federal Wrestling and Alpine Games Festival. Consequently, the iNUIT programme initially focused on crowd monitoring, with the aim of optimising the mobility and physical safety of visitors during major events, examining how to collect and process relevant data (via participants smartphones for example) and anticipating danger, particularly in emergency situations. More informaiton on iNUIT research program and related projects can be found here: iNUIT Brochure

The Senior Living Lab (SLL) is a transdisciplinary research platform that aims at promoting ageing well at home through the co-creation of innovative products, services and practices with older adults. While most living labs for ageing well are focused on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), this social laboratory adopts a transdisciplinary approach, bringing together designers, economists, engineers and healthcare professionals to develop multiple forms of social innovation using participatory methods. The SLL is based on an ecological approach, connecting professionals and users in a cooperative network and involving all of the stakeholders concerned with ageing well, such as existing associations, business entities and policy-makers. Three main themes for the co-design of products and services were identified at the beginning of the SLL conception, each sustained by a major business partner: healthy nutrition to cope with frailty, improved autonomous mobility to foster independence and social communication to prevent isolation..

SmartCrowd helps raising the level of safety in massive events, by providing a real-time monitoring of the crowd. Each individual's location, speed and heading are recorded by a custom application deployed on his smartphone and sent to a centralized server. The collected data is analyzed and results are generated approximately every second. In case of a possible critical situation inside the crowd, that may lead to a disaster, an alert is signaled. SmartCrowd can also detect possible critical situations in the future by predicting the state of the event. The detection of groups inside the crowd helps reducing the computation time of the prediction, thus making the real-time monitoring possible.

Living in a Smart Environment is a joint PhD research initiative between the MISG and DIVA groups to study natural and economic gesture-based HCI for everyday use. In present day interactive, intelligent computing, an efficient human–computer interaction is assuming utmost importance in our daily lives. The aim of this project is to develop a novel natural and economic gesture-based HCI for everyday use both at work and at home. The project has two main goals. The first goal is to build a cohesive understanding of gestures and the relationships that exist between different systems, users, contexts and interactions. In this work, we aim at designing a consistent gesture language and dialogs. The gesture language will include both human and technical design factors and will adapt to the context of use and user posture and will be defined using a user-centered design approach. The second goal is to study the opportunity for a hybrid sensor approach for natural interaction in a smart environment. Such hybrid sensor will fusion multimodal signals gathered from multiple sensing technologies either distributed in the physical environment or worn by the user himself.

Ce projet vise la mise en place d’un "eGov Innovation Center" pour la conception et le development de services de cyberadministration à haute valeur ajoutée pour la collectivité. Le centre aura pour mission d’offrir une plateforme de collaboration pérenne et pluridisciplinaire à travers la mise en place de laboratoires d’expérimentation de solutions innovantes et des réseaux de développement et de diffusion de produits et de services.

VICI is an ongoing applied research project focused on design and development of a generic framework for ubiquitous augmented reality applications based on tangible interaction.

For more details please look at VICI Website

The goal of the project is to develop a toolkit allowing to trasform any surface (a table, a mirror, etc.) in an interactive one. The toolkit will integrate three main technologies: the electromagnetic, the acoustic and the optical one, supporting rapid prototype development.

For more details please look at Inter-Face Website

The goal of the project is to develop a PIM (Personal Information Management) system for managing multimedia content. The system will provide the user with personalized information supporting contextualized browsing and searching activities. The system will be based on existing generic indexing and classification tools and will add to those systems an additional indexing level based on a semantic model which takes into account user's profile and preferences.

The goal of the project is to develop a system which recognizes facial expressions of people and then activates a puppet to do the same expression. The system will participate to Darwin21, a Swiss national competition, in September 2007.