"RowBot" was created during the course "Designing with complex sensors" during my first year of Masters in Industrial Design. 

 

The main goal of the course was to learn how to design and test an interactive system that involves complex sensing. When rowing on a rowing machine, it is not possible for the rower to control music, since his hands are always occupied during the workout. When the rower wants to skip a song, change volume or pause the music for a moment, he will always have to (momentarily) stop his workout to control his music player. For ROWbot, new interaction styles were explored that enable users to interact with a music player system while continuing their workout.
While rowing, the whole body is being used, except for the head which can move freely to a certain extent. Also interaction through speech recognition, a rapidly developing technology, could be seen as an opportunity to interact with the music player. Both interactions - through head-movements and through voice - have benefits and downsides. This project investigated the opportunities and limitations to use both head movements and speech recognition to control a system.
ROWbot utilizes a Kinect to keep track of the user’s head-movements and speech. Furthermore, ROWbot uses a screen, attached to the rowing machine, to display a graphical user interface which visualizes the different functions that can be used.