A cell phone call comes in when you are cooking. You want to reject the call
but both hands are occupied?. What can you do?
The PuffButton is badge you can wear on your shirt or lapel that senses when
you blow on it.
A novel aspect of this device is that it is capable of receiving a voice-like
(hands free) command, without the need for the user to actually make a sound.
The PuffButton allows the user to impart explicit commands with little or no
interruption of their current task.
The badge senses a blower?s puff through both a microphone and a thermister
pair.
The main challenges were to make it intuitive to use, small, able to filter out
unwanted phenomena such as speaking, wind, or pager motor vibrations and
(eventually) make a wireless mobile version. Future work might even include a
command language (e.g. puffing twice quickly means something different to a
single puff which in turn means something different to a long puff ).