Inferring Spatial Reasoning by Observing Human Interactions With Smart IoT Objects

This paper presents a proof-of-concept for a new paradigm for analyzing human-object interactions with high spatiotemporal resolution. The system comprises a set of smart IoT objects, equipped with sensors to monitor their spatial states and surroundings, including other smart objects. Each object is able to detect, store, and wirelessly report its orientation, rotation, adjacency, and various types of movements, both its own and those of neighboring objects. By collating this data, an analytical model can reconstruct a participant’s spatiotemporal handling of the objects with millisecond resolution, thereby inferring their spatial reasoning process. The objective is to establish a IoT echo systems for monitoring, characterizing, and enhancing human spatial reasoning through this novel approach of observing interactions between humans and objects with agency. The paper delves into the engineering details of the IoT system, followed by a series of spatial reasoning-related experiments. Subsequently, analytical methods are developed to gain insights into participants’ spatial reasoning within the context of two well-known tasks: the Tower of Hanoi and the Wechsler Block Design Task. Finally, the results are presented to demonstrate the practicality of the developed IoT-style smart object system for quantitatively understanding spatial reasoning in a data-driven manner.