Wearable Text Input Interface using Touch Typing Skills Kazuya Murao Ritsumeikan University 1-1-1 Nojihigashi, Kusatsu, Shiga 525-8577, Japan
[email protected] ABSTRACT
RELATED WORK
A lot of systems and devices for text input in wearable computing environment have been proposed and released thus far, while these are not commonly used due to drawbacks such as slow input speed, long training period, low usability, and low wearability. This paper proposes a wearable text input device using touch typing skills that would have been acquired for full-size keyboard. Users who have touch typing skills can input texts without training.
I assume that wearable text input systems should have the following characteristics. Wearability: the device does not hinder the user. Immediacy: the user does not have to put out the device nor to prepare for use. Eyes free: the user does not have to see his hand. Perfectibility: Name or imitation sound which are not listed in a dictionary can be typed perfectly. Introduction ease: the user can use the device with less training. Input speed: the user can input text with high speed. Confidentiality: typed texts cannot be known by the others. Sociality: use of the device is not a nuisance.
Author Keywords
Wearable computing, Input interface, Text input, Glove, Touch typing skills, Keyboard
Full-size keyboard provides high input speed but low wearability due to its size and weight. Small full-size keyboard that can be attached to the arm, WristPC Keyboard1 , is on sale by Tek Gear Inc. It has higher wearability, while usability decreases since keys and key pitch are small. Several types of half-sized keyboard have been proposed. Half keyboard by Mitias Corporation2 is left-half of a keyboard. Keys on the right-half can be typed by inverting left and right with Shift key. Katayama et al. also proposed half-sized keyboard[2] that estimates the number of keys typed on the right/left half from the keying interval of keys on the left/right half. These keyboard-based devices have high input speed, perfectibility, and introduction ease since the users know how to input letters, while involve drawbacks of wearability, immediacy, and eyes free.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2 Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): User Interfaces INTRODUCTION
Many types of wearable devices such as glasses and watches have appeared in these years, realizing the environment for sensing and displaying information any time and anywhere. Though many kinds of systems and devices for text input for wearable computing have been proposed and released thus far, these are not commonly used due to drawbacks such as slow input speed, long training period, low usability, and low wearability. For example, full-size keyboard provides high speed input, while the device is big to carry and wear. Moreover, the user have to grope for or to look at home position to start typing from non-typing activity. Downsizing the keyboard just deteriorates its usability. Specially configured devices have high wearability, while they impose learning special commands on the users.
Twiddler3 is a one-handed text input device by Tek Gear Inc. 12 buttons are allocated on its surface, enabling typing arbitrary letters with combination of two buttons. Glove-type devices have also been released. GAUNTLET4 has conductive touch sensors on its palm, enabling text input corresponding to the place touched. Fukumoto et al. proposed FingerRing[1] that detects finger tapping, enabling text input with combination of fingers. Special devices for wearable computing have an edge on wearability, while the users have to learn special input commands since these devices use combinations of small number of sensors for input, e.g. buttons.
This paper proposes a wearable text input system using touch typing skills that would have been acquired for full-size keyboard. Our system uses finger-word dictionary according as touch typing and retrieves the typed word from a sequence of finger tapping obtained through wearable devices. I implemented prototype glove device to detect finger tapping.
Senseboard5 measures fingers position by electric field sensing and the combination with an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) could learn our way of typing a text. The accuracy was,
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1
http://www.tekgear.com/black-wristpc-keyboard. html 2 http://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/ 3 http://twiddler.tekgear.com/ 4 http://gauntletkeyboard.com/ 5 http://www.senseboard.com/
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). AH ’15, Mar 09–11, 2015, Singapore, Singapore ACM 978-1-4503-3349-8/15/03. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2735711.2735779
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Figure 2. Prototype device.
Figure 1. System structure. Number of finger pa"erns [log scale]
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however, only 90-95%. Gesture based text input cannot be used in actual use due to poor recognition and difficulty of social acceptance. Though text input by speech recognition is widely used, it is annoying and input texts are clearly heard.
10000 1000 100 10 1 1
PROPOSED SYSTEM
Wearability, immediacy, and eyes free are essential for wearable text input system. High input speed, confidentiality, and sociality are desirable. Special encoding with small number of buttons to express alphabets is required since many buttons cannot be allocated to keep wearability. Special encoding, however, sets high threshold to start and master the system.
5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 Number of words assigned to one finger pa"ern
23
Figure 3. Distribution of words assigned to finger patterns.
Electronics, Inc.)7 is glued at each fingertip of the glove and connected to the shield of our own making. Output voltage of the pressure sensors are monitored with Arduino Uno8 , transmitted to PC via Bluetooth. This device runs with 9V dry battery. The weight is approximately 100[g].
System structure
This paper proposes a text input system that estimates a typed word from a sequence of finger tapping by using finger-word dictionary. Figure 1 shows the system structure. The proposed system assumes that the user has touch typing skills and letters are typed with proper fingers, i.e. ‘q’, ‘a’, and ‘z’ are typed with left little finger. A sequence of finger tapping is obtained through wearable devices such as glove, ring, and bracelet. The system delimits the sequence with thumb corresponding to [SPACE] key, and sub-sequences of finger tapping are obtained. Then the system looks up the words corresponding to the sub-sequence from the dictionary. If the number of candidate is one, it is output, otherwise the candidates are displayed and the user selects by tapping with thumb. Function keys like [Enter] and [Shift] are configurable with long press or simultaneous press.
Evaluation on dictionary
I constructed finger-word dictionary from the word list9 that contains 109,562 words. Figure 3 shows the distribution of words assigned to finger patterns. 96,414 kinds of finger patterns were generated, 88,555 of which assign one word. Maximum number of words assigned to a finger pattern is 23, which includes “bagged”, “barbed”, “barfed” and so on. Average number of words assigned to a finger pattern is 1.136. This result shows 91.8% words can be identified and candidates of the rest words are narrowed down to practically selectable number. CONCLUSION
I proposed a wearable text input system using touch typing skills and implemented prototype device. The device can be used on any surface like table, wall, and thigh. Way of typing is same as conventional keyboard, therefore no training is needed. The proposed system can be applied to any language. I plan to evaluate input speed and construct multilingual system.
T96 , which stands for text on 9 keys, is text input solution for mobile device, allowing users to enter text quickly using one key press per letter with numeric keypad. Though my approach is similar to T9, assignment using touch typing has not been proposed as far as I know. Tough perfectibility is missed since words which are not listed in the dictionary cannot be typed, user-specific words can be typed by creating dictionary with words typed in a desktop and laptop environment. Moreover, the proposed system can be applied to any language that can be typed through conventional keyboard.
REFERENCES
1. M. Fukumoto et al. Body coupled fingerring :wireless wearable keyboard. In CHI ’97 (1997), 147–154. 2. T. Katayama et al. A text input method for half-sized keyboard using keying interval. In MUM 2012, no. 6 (2012), 1–8.
Prototype device
I have implemented the prototype device as shown in Figure 2. Though the device is glove-type, my system assumes other forms such as ring and bracelet. I have implemented the device for both hands. Pressure sensor (FSR402 by Interlink 6
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http://www.interlinkelectronics.com/FSR402.php http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno 9 http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/wordlists/ english/ 8
http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-product/t9/
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