Towards natural interfaces to interact with physical systems using smart mobile devices

As machines in most industries continue to grow in complexity, user interfaces play an increasingly important role in allowing operators to naturally interact with such machines. In this paper, we present a versatile approach that can enable operators to interact with a variety of machines using smart mobile devices. A low-cost, embedded system-based setup and an easy-to-implement communication method to wirelessly interface smart mobile devices with physical systems are presented. An application development and evaluation approach is adapted from human-computer interaction research and employed to investigate the functionality and usability of mobile-mediated interactions with physical systems. The approach is applied to the design of a mobile application to interact with a DC servomotor test bed using an ¡Phone.