ICare

Abstract

With the proliferation of smartphones, children often use the same smartphones of their parents to play games or surf Internet, and can potentially access kid-unfriendly content from the Internet jungle. It is critical to employ parent patrol mechanisms such that children are limited to child-friendly contents only. A successful parent patrol strategy has to be user-friendly and privacy-aware. The apps that require explicit actions from parents may not be effective when parents forget to enable them, and the ones that use built-in cameras to detect children may impose privacy violations. In this paper, we propose iCare, which can identify child users automatically and seamlessly as users operate smartphones. In particular, iCare investigates the intrinsic differences of screen-touch patterns between child and adult users. We discover that users' touch behaviors depend on a user's age. Thus, iCare records the touch behaviors and extracts hand-geometry and finger dexterity features that capture the age information. We conducted experiments on 31 people including 17 elementary school kids (3 to 11 years old) and 14 adults (22 to 60). Results show that iCare can achieve 84% accuracy for child identification using only a single swipe on the screen, and the accuracy becomes 97% with 8 consecutive swipes.