High5: Promoting Interpersonal Hand-to-Hand Touch
for Vibrant Workplace with Electrodermal Sensor Watches

http://nclab.kaist.ac.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/High5_Camera_Ready_final.pdfa7a05

This work was presented at UBICOMP 2014. The authors present a system designed for detecting and rewarding interpersonal, hand-to-hand interactions such as  “high-fives,” in order to promote a more cheerful and vibrant workplace atmosphere. Users wear smartwatch-like devices, which use acceleration and skin potential to detect when users high-five each other. Each user is then awarded “high-five points,”  which encourages them to high-five each other even more. This presumably continues until everybody’s hands have open wounds on them from all that high-fiving.

What makes this work interesting is that it focuses on characterizing and supporting social behaviors, rather than purely physical ones, as is the case with most wearables. Furthermore, hand movements are  particularly challenging from technical  standpoint, since they have many degrees of freedom and lots of subtlety. We humans are naturally very adept at classifying that subtlety into concrete communicative intents, but teaching a wearable computer how to do it is a whole new ball game. Any researcher who makes tangible progress in that direction  deserves a major high-five: