A smart ring has been developed to overcome the frustration of miscommunication many consumers have using voice commands to control smart devices.
University of Washington doctoral student Maruchi Kim said voice commands could often be cumbersome.
“We wanted to create something that’s as simple and intuitive as clicking on an icon on your computer desktop,” Mr Kim said.
He said IRIS, which stands for Interactive Ring for Interfacing with Smart home devices, was a smart ring that allowed users to control smart devices by aiming the ring’s small camera at the device and clicking a built-in button.
“The prototype Bluetooth ring sends an image of the selected device to the user’s phone, which controls the device.”
Mr Kim said the user could adjust the device with the button and, for devices with gradient controls, such as a speaker’s volume, by rotating their hand.
He said the team decided to put the system in a ring because they believed users would realistically wear that throughout the day.
“The challenge, then, was integrating a camera into a wireless smart ring with its size and power constraints.
“The system also had to toggle devices in under a second; otherwise, users tend to think it is not working.”
Mr Kim said to achieve this, researchers had the ring compress the images before sending them to a phone.
He said a study, twice as many users preferred IRIS over just a voice command system, such as Apple’s Siri.
“On average, IRIS controlled home devices more than two seconds faster than voice commands.”
Mr Kim said in the future, integrating the IRIS camera system into a health-tracking smart ring could be transformative.
“It’d let smart rings actually augment or improve human capability, rather than just telling you your step count or heart rate.”
