AirText: One-Handed Text Entry in the Air for COTS Smartwatches

Abstract

Text entry for smartwatches is a useful service for many applications like sending text messages and replying emails. Traditional touchscreen-based approaches are two-handed text entry methods, that could be cumbersome when the user is performing other tasks with one hand. Therefore, we propose AirText, the first one-handed text entry method which achieves accurate and practical handwriting in the air for commercial smartwatches. By analyzing the inertial readings from the smartwatch worn on the wrist, AirText is able to accurately recognize the in-air handwritten characters. However, the wrist movements, which produce the inertial readings, are harmful to the user to focus on the screen. In order to address this challenge, AirText uses a novel cross-modal supervision design to achieve accurate character recognition from the small wrist movements. AirText further includes a novel word recommendation method to speed up the text entry. We implement AirText on five smartwatches and evaluate its performance extensively with eight volunteers and more than 25,000 in-air handwritten characters. Results show that AirText outperforms two baselines methods and achieves comparable text entry speed as two-handed approaches.