ECE 469/496/590: Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing Systems Design — Spring 2023

Class meeting time and location: TuTh 1:45–3:00 pm EST, Hudson Hall 216

Superheroes Wearables

Instructor: Dr. Rabih Younes (ry65)
Instructor 1-on-1 office hours are available by appointment (link to make appointments posted on Sakai).
To provide anonymous feedback about anything related to the course, please follow the link posted on Sakai.

TA: TA office hours (location: Hudson Hall 101A):

Course Description

In this course, students design, implement, and evaluate wearable and ubiquitous computing systems while learning about the fundamentals and pertinent research in the field. Topics covered include challenges and constraints in wearable and ubiquitous computing, input/output devices, human-computer interaction, embedded systems, prototyping, machine learning with focus on activity and affect recognition, applications with focus on healthcare, ethics, and societal impact. This course also covers project management and planning as students work on a semester-long team-based multidisciplinary project. Prerequisites: ECE 350L or ECE 550D. One course.

Learning Objectives

Having successfully completed this course, the student should be able to:

Textbook and Other Course Material

No textbook is required for this course. All material will be posted on Sakai. I will always try to have slides posted before class time so that you can take notes on them if you would like to.

Grading Policy (undergrad|grad students)

Important Notes

We can only grade what we receive. Always check what you are submitting and make sure you submit the right files.

We will use the Scrum agile project management framework throughout the project. You are free to select the tool that would help you with that.

We will use Google Drive to keep track of each team's progress (team meeting minutes, individual progress reports, etc.) in order to facilitate documentation and grading.

We have access to different labs for project-related work and storage (lockers).

There will be awards at the end of the semester for best project, best presenter, and best research analyst.

Misconduct

Tentative Schedule

Week Date Topic Due
1 Th 1/12 Syllabus
2 Tu 1/17 Intro to UbiComp + Prototyping Presentation topic preferences
2 Th 1/19 Agile Project Management with Scrum + NABC
3 Tu 1/24 Introduction to Embedded Systems and Making
3 Th 1/26 Discussing Teams' Project Proposals Team project proposal
4 Tu 1/31 The Vision of UbiComp According to Mark Weiser Paper review
4 Th 2/2 QFT & Decision Matrices + Project-Related Work
5 Tu 2/7 HCI/UCD Paper review
5 Th 2/9 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
6 Tu 2/14 Challenges and Constraints in Wearables Design Paper review
6 Th 2/16 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
7 Tu 2/21 Wearable Input/Output Technologies Paper review + Team Peer Feedback 1
7 Th 2/23 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
8 Tu 2/28 UbiComp Sensing Paper review
8 Th 3/2 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
9 Tu 3/7 Mid-Semester Project Presentations Mid-semester project presentation
9 Th 3/9 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
10 Tu 3/14 NO CLASS (Spring Recess)
10 Th 3/16 NO CLASS (Spring Recess)
11 Tu 3/21 Context Awareness Paper review + Team Peer Feedback 2
11 Th 3/23 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
12 Tu 3/28 Introduction to Machine Learning (guest lecture by TA)
12 Th 3/30 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
13 Tu 4/4 UbiComp & Society + Writing Scholarly Papers
13 Th 4/6 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
14 Tu 4/11 Guest Lecture by Chris Koszarsky — Director of Engineering, Garmin International
14 Th 4/13 Project-Related Work Project weekly deliverables
15 Tu 4/18 Project Final Presentations & Demos Final project presentation
17 W 5/3 NO CLASS Project report + Research paper (grad students only)

This semester's award winners: