Small Touchscreen Research Articles

Touch pointer: rethink point-and-click for accurate indirect touch interactions on small touchscreens

As a video resolution of handheld devices, such as a smartphone, increases higher, it becomes harder for a user to touch a tiny item accurately on a small touchscreen. The touch pointer implemented in dual layers may resolve this problem and render more functions to the touch action1.

A Low-Power Ultra-Light Small and Medium Size Acoustic Wave Touch Screen

Traditional surface acoustic wave touch screen causes high power consumption. The controller that needs to generate driving sound transducer voltage leads to large volume and high cost. It is difficult to become integration of the controller and small and medium size portable information terminal. So a low-power, ultra-light, small and medium size surface acoustic wave touch screen technology solution is proposed. On the touch screen set passive manned sensors and active detection circuit at the same time, the state transition of active detection circuit triggered by passive manned sensors, realize a touch of low power consumption, high precision requirements. In this paper the principal and system structure are discussed and the superiority is given.

Drag-and-type: a new method for typing with virtual keyboards on small touchscreens

Small touchscreens are widely used in consumer electronics, such as smartphones and mobile electronic devices. However, typing on the small touchscreen is still worth studying. In fact, smartphone users are experiencing difficulties and also many errors in typing alphanumeric keys with their thumbs because a small virtual keyboard even with the reduced set of touchable keys can only provide tiny size keys to the users. This paper studies a new style of typing method called Drag-and-Type, which leverages the dragging action instead of direct tapping on the touchscreen to ease more accurate typing on the small virtual keyboard. Although the typing speed is controversial, the consumers can choose this method when an accurate typing is more required, for example, for a password entry that is quite more sensitive to erroneous key inputs. In that sense, the proposed method is further explored to the extension called Secure Drag-and-Type for securing the password entry against shoulder-surfing and spyware attacks under the Dragand- Type paradigm. In the user study, it was found that the proposed method could be used for secure and accurate password entry on the small touchscreen regarding the securitysensitive consumer electronics applications.

Design of Pneumatic and Control System for Quartz Crystal Tin Dipping Machine

This paper introduces the craft process and work principle of the quartz crystal tin dipping machine, and pays attention to elaborate the design content of pneumatic system and control system. The equipments control cores are Siemens small size PLC and industrial touch screen, and selects air cylinder and micro motor as the main executive components, which can guarantee the facilities reliability and flexibility, have strong anti-interference capability. Through long-term spot application, it indicates this tin dipping machine has stable operation, low failure rate and flexible and convenient operation.

Sensuous electronics [Reflections

The entrepreneur had finished talking about the software and processing algorithms for a new camera he was marketing, and as he came down from the stage he left the camera on the podium-perhaps forgotten, but perhaps suggesting that it wasn't expensive enough to worry about. · I was contemplating those processing algorithms when a woman who had been sitting behind me pushed by, heading up the aisle. As she passed by, I heard her urgently muttering to herself, "I have to touch it." · It seemed a curious urge. All the magic was in the software and algorithms; the hardware was simply a lens, a sensor, and a few chips. Yet I understood exactly what she was saying. I felt the same way myself. · Why, I asked myself, did I have this need to touch? I started to think about the look and feel of electronic gadgets instead of their functionality. Meanwhile, another speaker was showing a small intelligent thermostat that promised to learn your heating habits and usage. She said it had been designed to be "pretty and fun." Indeed, it had a certain unadorned beauty, simply a circular face with a small touch screen. It seemed the hardware equivalent of the Google home page-minimal and clean. When I remarked on this, someone told me that the insides of the thermostat were equally beautiful. Looking again up at the stage, I was surprised to recognize the truth of this observation. The uncovered circuit board inside resembled a work of art, having the clean geometric lines of a Mondrian painting, compressed to a minimal size and with no appearance of clutter. It exuded a powerful latent functionality.

Extracting Flick Operator for Predicting Performance by GOMS Model in Small Touch Screen

Objective: The purpose of this study is to extract GOMS manual operator, except for an experiment with participants. Background: The GOMS model has advantage of rapid modeling which is suitable for the environment of technology development which has a short life cycle products with a fast pace. The GOMS model was originally designed for desktop environment so that it is not adequate for implementing into the latest HCI environment such as small touch screen device. Therefore, this research proposed GOMS manual operator extraction methodology which is excluded experimental method. And flick Gesture was selected to explain application of proposed methodology to extract new operator. Method: Divide into start to final step of hand gesture needed to extract as an operator through gesture task analysis. Then apply the original GOMS operator to each similar step of gesture and modify the operator for implementation stage based on existing Fitts' law research. Steps that are required to move are modified based on the Fitts' law developed in touch screen device. Finally, new operator can be derived from using these stages and a validation experiment, performed to verify the validity of new operator and methodology by comparing human performance. Results: The average movement times of the participants' performance and the operator which is extracted in case study are not different significantly. Also the average of movement times of each type of view study is not different significantly. Conclusion: In conclusion, the result of the proposed methodology for extracting new operator is similar to the result of the experiment with their participants. Furthermore the GOMS model included the operator by the proposed methodology in this research could be applied successfully to predict the user's performance. Application: Using this methodology could be applied to develop new finger gesture in the touch screen. Also this proposed methodology could be applied to evaluate the usability of certain system rapidly including the new finger gesture performance.

A HCI interface based on hand gestures

Human–computer interaction, or HCI for short, concerning how people interact with computers, has long been an important and popular research field. Though not completely realistic, fancy HCI applications such as those shown in the science fiction movies Minority Report and Iron Man have impressively demonstrated the potential and trend of HCI technologies that will be very soon made available. As one can very often observe, compared with traditional keyboard/mouse interfaces, the exclusive use of hands has distinguished itself by enjoying a more intuitive and natural way for communication. Furthermore, the increasingly popular concept of ubiquitous computing has called for convenient and portable input devices, thus making hand gesture inputs even more attractive. For example, a smart phone equipped with the capability of hand gesture recognition could be a good input substitute for its intrinsically small touch screen or keypad. Rather than data gloves, which transfer hand gestures through relatively expensive electronic devices, we are more interested in recognizing the gestures of a bare hand. In this regard, there exist works that can track a 2D articulated hand model. In this paper, we make further improvement in computation efficiency and propose novel interfaces to be coupled with the hand tracking system for more user-friendliness.

Tablet-based 3D sketching and curve reverse modelling

This paper describes the development of an innovative hardware and software tool useful to sketch planar shapes in computer aided industrial design and computer aided design systems. The proposed system is based upon a tracked touch screen hand-held by the designer. The whole system is composed by a portable hand-held small touch screen (tablet size), a fixed LCD display and an optical tracking equipment. The touch screen is added by a simple camera for mixed reality optional functionality and its 6° of freedom movements are tracked. A custom software has been implemented for optimal exploitation and 3D sketching. The system acts as a free sketching device, a 3D mouse, as a realtime virtual and physical sketching plane or an external shape remodelling tool. The results obtained confirm the benefits of the virtual tablet in design, modelling and reverse engineering of industrial products.

Use of a Touchscreen Monitor to Streamline Intraoperative Deep Brain Stimulation Research

Background: Creating a somatotopic map of the subthalamic nucleus of a patient undergoing deep brain stimulation requires extra procedural steps, hardware, and personnel and can result in prolonged procedural time. Objective: ClockSynch, a custom program used to collect intraoperative data, requires user input during surgery. A small touchscreen may simplify the researcher’s interaction with data collection software and minimize the impact of the research protocol on overall operative time. This possibility was investigated using the multi-input multioutput (MIMO) 720S, a lightweight touchscreen. Methods: ClockSynch is designed to be used with the MIMO 720S in touchscreen mode. During intraoperative data collection, the researcher used the MIMO to control ClockSynch without interacting with the computer running the program. Results: Once correctly configured, the MIMO was used in the operating room without any incidence of failure during intraoperative data collection. It also had the advantage of being compact and lightweight enough to be placed at any location around the patient and allowed the primary researcher to interact with the research software and the patient simultaneously. Conclusions: Small, touchscreen devices such as the MIMO 720S can facilitate intraoperative research by providing a simple interface with research software that allows a single researcher to perform more duties. Such devices also minimize the impact of research protocol on operative time.

One-handed thumb interaction of mobile devices from the input accuracy perspective

One-handed thumb interaction has been widely used for mobile devices with touch screens. This study investigated input accuracy and pressing patterns of one-handed thumb interaction by conducting an experiment with forty subjects. The experiment examined seventy-five different touch key designs, combinations of three touch key sizes (i.e., squares with 4 mm, 7 mm, and 10 mm widths) and twenty-five touch key locations. Two accuracy measures, success rate and input offset, were collected in the experiment. The results showed that success rate increased with target size. Touch key locations providing a high success rate (‘accurate region’) were identified for each touch key size, and they differed depending on touch key size. Input offset, the difference between the center of a target and a pressed point, was also affected by touch key size and location, and its distribution had a similar form to the Gaussian distribution. The results regarding input offset provided a basic understanding of pressing patterns of one-handed thumb interaction. Furthermore, a practical approach for designing usable touch keys was proposed to improve success rate of one-handed interaction. A computer simulation was performed to validate the approach using the data collected in the experiment. The proposed approach could increase input accuracy of one-handed interaction without an increase of task completion time. Relevance to industry One-handed thumb interaction with a small touch screen has been widely accepted in the handset industry. This study is an initial attempt to systematically investigate input accuracy and pressing patterns of one-handed thumb interaction. In addition, the proposed solution to usable touch key design has advantages over previous techniques from the UI designer’s perspective as well as from the user’s perspective. Hence, the results of this study could be widely used in the design of usable touch interfaces for mobile devices, especially mobile phones.

Two-mode target selection: Considering target layouts in small touch screen devices

A variety of studies have been conducted to improve methods of selecting a tiny virtual target on small touch screen interfaces of handheld devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. These studies, however, focused on a specific selection method, and did not consider various layouts resulting from different target sizes and densities on the screen. This study proposes a Two-Mode Target Selection (TMTS) method that automatically detects the target layout and changes to an appropriate mode using the concept of an activation area. The usability of TMTS was compared experimentally to those of other methods. TMTS changed to the appropriate mode successfully for a given target layout and showed the shortest task completion time and the fewest touch inputs. TMTS was also rated by the users as the easiest to use and the most preferred. TMTS could significantly increase the ease, accuracy, and efficiency of target selection, and thus enhance user satisfaction when the users select targets on small touch screen devices. Relevance to Industry The results of this study can be used to develop fast and accurate target selection methods in handheld devices with touch screen interfaces especially when the users use their thumb to activate the desired target.

Cocktail

Today’s mobile devices are capable of creating and storing a large amount of multimedia data, but sharing such data with others remains challenging. Even when a user wishes to send a picture to a friend located next to the user, current wireless data transfer techniques usually demand several steps requiring inconvenient user involvement, such as manipulation of tiny buttons on a small touch screen. This paper presents ‘Cocktail’, a new gesture-based mobile interaction system that exploits gestures employed by bartenders for easy data sharing between co-located users. In our system, users can pour (transfer) multimedia data in their mobile devices to other friends’ devices in a manner akin to a bartender pouring a drink into a glass. Cocktail also provides an intuitive way of creating new content by mixing existing data with a shaking gesture. For example, users can make music videos with their favorite music and pictures in the mobile phone by selecting them and shaking the mobile phone. The authors have implemented a prototype of Cocktail with commercial smart phones and evaluated its usability via user studies.

A Software Keyboard for Small Touch Screen Terminals based on the Coming and Going Movement of the Thumb

A Software Keyboard for Small Touch Screen Terminals based on the Coming and Going Movement of the Thumb

Touch key design for one-handed thumb interaction with a mobile phone: Effects of touch key size and touch key location

This study investigated effects of touch key sizes and locations on one-handed thumb input on a mobile phone. Three different touch key sizes (i.e. square shape with 4 mm, 7 mm, and 10 mm wide) and twenty-five locations were examined in an experiment. A total of thirty subjects participated in the experiment in which they preformed a task of pressing a single target on a small touch screen. Two time-related measures (first transition time and task completion time), number of errors, and subjective satisfaction (pressing convenience) were collected in the experiment. The results revealed that the touch key size of 7 mm and 10 mm provided the best performance for time-related measures, while the touch key size of 10 mm only provided the best results for the other measures. In addition, the usability of touch key locations was statistically analyzed. Touch key locations providing good usability (‘good regions’) were also identified for each measure. Recommendations were proposed for designing a touch user interface on a mobile phone based on the results of this study. Relevance to industry The touch user interface is in the limelight of the handset industry. This study conducted basic research to investigate the effects of touch key sizes and touch key locations for one-handed interaction. The results of this study could be used for designing a touch user interface to enhance the usability of mobile phones and other small devices with a touch screen as well.

An architecture for the deployment of mobile decision support systems

The widespread use of mobile computing devices offers the opportunity of supplying decision support systems, targeted at specific situations and operated at the point of decision. Unfortunately, the computing environment within which such systems are deployed is radically different from the environments in which decision procedures are most easily designed. We summarise experience in reconciling these differences, using a general architecture but working in a specific domain (forest management). This required us to reconcile the constraints of the mobile computing device (limited resources, small touch-screen, support for procedural programming languages only) with the ability to rapidly select and configure different decision procedures for deployment in differing management conditions. We managed to reconcile these conflicting demands by taking advantage of the restricted forms of inference needed in the domain, making it possible to combine declarative and procedural aspects of the problem in a reliable way.

Shifting moralities: From sanctity of life to quality of life

Emerging security requirements lead to new validation protocols to be implemented to recent authentication systems by employing biometric traits instead of regular passwords. If an additional security is required in authentication phase, keystroke recognition and classification systems and related interfaces are very promising for collecting and classifying biometric traits. These systems generally operate in time-domain; however, the conventional time-domain solutions could be inadequate if a touchscreen is so small to enter any kind of alphanumeric passwords or a password consists of one single character like a tap to the screen. Therefore, we propose a novel frequency-based authentication system, TAPSTROKE, as a prospective protocol for small touchscreens and an alternative authentication methodology for existing devices. We firstly analyzed the binary train signals formed by tap passwords consisting of taps instead of alphanumeric digits by the regular (STFT) and modified short time Fourier transformations (mSTFT). The unique biometric feature extracted from a tap signal is the frequency-time localization achieved by the spectrograms which are generated by these transformations. The touch signals, generated from the same tap-password, create significantly different spectrograms for predetermined window sizes. Finally, we conducted several experiments to distinguish future attempts by one-class support vector machines (SVM) with a simple linear kernel for Hamming and Blackman window functions. The experiments are greatly encouraging that we achieved 1.40%–2.12% and 2.01%–3.21% equal error rates (EER) with mSTFT; while with regular STFT the classifiers produced quite higher EER, 7.49%–11.95% and 6.93%–10.12%, with Hamming and Blackman window functions, separately. The whole methodology, as an expert system for protecting the users from fraud attacks sheds light on new era of authentication systems for future smart gears and watches.

Investigating touchscreen typing: the effect of keyboard size on typing speed

Two studies investigated the effect keyboard size has on typing speed and error rates for touchscreen keyboards using the lift-off strategy . A cursor appeared when users touched the screen and a key was selected when they lifted their finger from the screen. Four keyboard sizes were investigated ranging from 24.6 cm to 6.8 cm wide. Results indicate that novices can type approximately 10 words per minute (WPM) on the smallest keyboard and 20 WPM on the largest. Experienced users improved to 21 WPM on the smallest keyboard and 32 WPM on the largest. These results indicate that, although slower, small touchscreen keyboards can be used for limited data entry when the presence of a regular keyboard is not practical. Applications include portable pocket-sized or palmtop computers, messaging systems, and personal information resources. Results also suggest the increased importance of experience on these smaller keyboards. Research directions are suggested.