Handwriting on Smartwatches: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

The results of an experimental study on handwriting on smartwatches are described in this study. This study aims to gain knowledge on the current practice and possible future developments on smartwatches. This includes two experiments: the first experiment aims to compare a state-of-the-art commercial handwriting system to other competing text entry methods based on soft keyboards, whereas the other experiment allows us to gather some useful information regarding users’ performance and preference in an ideal setting (without character recognition), so as to direct the design of future handwriting applications on small devices. In the first experiment, we obtained an initial entry speed of 7.5 wpm, lower than that of the other compared methods. The performance obtained in the second experiment, in the range of 15–19 wpm, suggests that by appropriately changing some settings (e.g., improved recognition and feedback, preferred writing style, and spare of space characters), the entry speed can be significantly increased. The results also showed that users prefer to enter uppercase characters and that, although this style of writing requires a significantly greater number of gestures per character, it does not adversely affect the writing speed.