Using Hall Effect Sensors for 3D Space Text Entry on Smartwatches

Abstract

The use of ultra-small smart devices, such as smartwatches, has become increasingly popular, particularly at the consumer level, in recent years. Smartwatch is a kind of interactive device that offers the ability to read text messages, email and notifications, once it is synchronized with a smartphone. But, performing efficient text input task on smartwatch is really difficult due to its small touch screen display. In this paper, we present hall effect sensors based text entry mechanism that effectively uses the 3D space around the smartwatch for entering alphanumeric characters. Our proposed text input technique (a) does not consume any screen space; (b) does not need any visual search to find a character and (c) does not suffer from fat finger problem.