Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are used as flame retardants in furniture foam, electronics, and other home furnishings. A field study was conducted that enrolled 139 households from California, which has had more stringent flame retardant requirements than other countries and areas. The study collected passive air, floor and indoor window surface wipes, and dust samples (investigator co...

This chapter explores the poetics of everyday objects, and their abilities to elicit meaningful interactions. Our focus is on a special kind of everyday objects: a chosen set of “augmented” chairs and tables, especially designed to gently disrupt usually associated emotional / social responses, and shake habitual ways in which people interact with – and through – furniture. We address the physi...

We present MoCoShoP, a system that supports the collaborative process of shopping and planning furniture and interior items. The system consists of a mobile application running on the users' mobile phones and an interactive surface application deployed on shared planning desks in the furniture retail store environment. Users belonging together share a virtual shopping cart. By scanning labels a...

In the era of e-commerce while buying furniture online the customers obviously feel the need for visual representation of the arrangement of their furniture. Even when doing interiors of the house it's difficult to just rely on assumptions about best layouts possible and professional help may become quite expensive. In this project, we make use of Genetic Algorithm (GA) which is an Artificial I...

According to the World Health Organization, the rate of people aged 60 or more is growing faster than any other age group in almost every country, and this trend is not going to change in a near future. Since senior citizens are at high risk of non communicable diseases requiring longterm care, this trend will challenge the sustainability of the entire health system. Pervasive computing can pro...

Mobile robotics is a potential solution to home behavior monitoring for the elderly. For a mobile robot in the real world, there are several types of uncertainties for its perceptions, such as the ambiguity between a target object and the surrounding objects and occlusions by furniture. The problem could be more serious for a home behavior-monitoring system, which aims to accurately recognize t...

BACKGROUND In Hawai'i, mortality and morbidity from asthma are significant. In the 80's, there had been no local studies of topography folklore. There had been only one report of seasonal variation in house dust mite (HDM) density in Hawai'i, and this showed no significant variation in O'ahu's Manoa Valley but a definite variation in Waikiki. There were no studies of complete replacement of fur...

Web-enabling technologies represent the next generation of design environments to design and manufacture complex systems, such as them characterizing contract furniture. In the context of web applications to facilitate and support teamwork in collaborative product development, the paper presents a CAD-based infrastructure for the 3D visualization of co-designed solutions, the on-line customizat...

In accordance with the fundamental principles and methods of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this paper has explored the design process and methods on modeling technique of furniture equipment through studying the computer-aided modeling design of modern furniture products; and builds up a complete set of 2D and 3D sketch design system through demonstrating the transformation of furniture pro...