Scientists have developed a new smartwatch that can be operated with wrist movements and gestures, allowing users to control the device even when their hands are not free — such as while carrying groc
Scientists have developed a new smartwatch that can be operated with wrist movements and gestures, allowing users to control the device even when their hands are not free — such as while carrying groceries or holding a bus handle.
WristWhirl, the smartwatch prototype, uses the wrist wearing the watch as an always-available joystick to perform common touchscreen gestures with one-handed continuous input. “WristWhirl is the first to explore gestural input,” said Xing-Dong Yang, assistant professor at Dartmouth College, US.
To develop the prototype, researchers studied the biomechanical ability of the wrist by tasking a small group of participants to conduct eight joystick-like gestures while standing and walking.
Participants wore the watch on their left wrist and were asked to use their wrist to make four directional marks similar to flicking a touch screen, and four free-form shapes, such as a triangle.
They were asked to make these gestures with their hand-up in front of their body during which they could see the gesture being drawn on the watch’s screen, and with their hand-down alongside their body. They were able to make directional marks at an average rate of half a second and free-form shapes at an average rate of about 1.5 seconds.
Visual feedback appeared to slow down participants, when their hand was out in front of them and fastest when the hand was down alongside their body.
To measure the accuracy of the free-form paths drawn using Wrist-Whirl, researchers used the $1 gesture recogniser and found it could recognise the marks with a 93.8 per cent accuracy.
WristWhirl was built from a 2” TFT display and a plastic watch strap augmented with 12 infrared proximity sensors and a Piezo vibration sensor placed inside the wrist strap, connected to an Arduino DUE board.
