Chapter 7. Using Android APIs for Human Interaction

The advent of personal computers in the 1980s started a new challenge: making computers and computation useful for and usable by hobbyists, students, and, in more general terms, technology enthusiasts. These people needed an easy way to control their machines, so human and computer interaction quickly became an open research field aimed at improving usability and resulting in the development of graphical user interfaces and new input devices. In the last decade, other interaction patterns such as voice recognition, voice synthesis, motion tracking, and many others were used in commercial applications, a great improvement that indirectly caused the evolution of objects such as phones, tablets, and glasses into a new kind of smarter devices.

The goal of this chapter is to take advantage of these new interaction patterns using a subset of Android APIs enhancing the Chronotherm prototype with a new set of features, thus making it...