Hello, everyone.
My name is Xuan.
I'd like to present our work on designing
user defined above the neck gestures for
people with upper body motor impairments.
This work was done with my
advisor professor Mingming Fan,
and doctor Teng Han.
There are over 1 billion disabled people
in the world with over 75 million of
them being physically disabled.
Our study focused mostly on
those with motor impairments,
some common problems that cause motor
impairments include limb loss or injury,
cerebral palsy,
spinal cord injury, and others,
which cause people with motor
impairments to have shaky hands.
No sensation of their hands.
Difficult in speaking,
use wheelchairs or be
unable to use their hands.
Recently,
Fan et al. proposed nine eyelid gestures for
people with motor impairments to interact
with mobile devices without touch,
Although these gestures were
designed to follow principles,
they were nonetheless designed by researchers
who do not have motor impairments.
Thus it remains an open question,
what gestures people with motor impairments
would want to design and use for themselves
to interact with mobile phones.
We conducted a user study with 17
participants who have motor impairments.
26 commands were chosen from the
official iOS and Android websites,
as well as from some recent
works for smartphone
interactions.
We classified these commands into three
categories based on their commonalities.
Group 1 contained twelve general
commands such as single tap,
double tap and flick.
While group 2 contained ten
APP related commands,
such as open the APP
move to the next target APP.
And group 3 contained four
physical button related commands,
such as turning up and down the
volume and taking a screenshot.
Here are the video clips we used to
demonstrate each command task.
The first one is zoom in
and the next container
and volume up.
The participants saw a video
representation of each command
before creating a gesture for it.
They were free to design the gestures
using any upper neck body component.
After all
participants designed gestures
for the 26 commands.
We found the gestures could be
breakdown into seven categories.
There are only eyes, only head,
only mouth,
eyes and head,
eyes and mouth,
head and mouth,
and eyes and head and mouth.
We also faced the problem
of gesture conflict,
for example,
turning head to the left and looking left
was a gesture that had the same number of
people performed to the command
drag and swipe left.
Drag was a single command,
and swipe left was a paired
command with swipe right.
We would prioritize the
gesture to the paired ones.
This is the sketch of our final gesture set,
each command was given at least
one corresponding gesture that was
designed by the participants.
For example,
zoom in was matched with wide open eyes,
and zoom out was matched with squint eyes,
raising head and looking upward was assigned
to scroll up and lowering head and looking
downward was assigned to scroll down.
There was also a strong symmetry
in the gesture design.
After creating the user
defined gesture set,
we wondered which of the user defined
gestures were more appropriate for
the users who would use the gestures
to interact with smartphones.
Not only people with motor impairments
are likely to use these gestures,
but also anyone who would encounter
conditionally motor impairments,
such as hand occupied when
taking the bus or holding stuffs.
Following that,
we performed a survey study
with 24 participants,
including 10 people with motor
impairments and 14 non-disabled people.
We asked them to choose the most
appropriate gesture for the same
26 commands as previously.
For each command question,
we gave them three gesture options that
were selected from the gestures that
were gathered in the last user study,
or they can develop a new gesture.
The findings revealed that participants with
and without motor impairments had a high
level of agreement on gesture choices,
Participants without motor impairments
still mostly preferred one of the three
gestures designed by people with motor
impairments than proposing other gestures.
Surprisingly,
one of the non-disabled participants said
that certain movements were so complex,
that no one would find it
easier than using their hands.
Unless they had paraplegia.
It would be interesting to learn what
other non-disabled individuals think
about the upper neck gesture
interaction in the future.
Based on our study,
we proposed some gesture
design considerations,
such as requiring little effort
to remember the gestures,
assigning more than one
gesture to each command,
allowing people to customize the
gestures based on their preferences
and physical conditions,
and keeping social acceptance in mind.
More commands,
more diverse people involved,
and more aspects of analysis on
gesture creation between
people with motor impairments
and those without motor impairments
might be included in the future study.
Thank you for listening.
For more Information,
please refer to our paper.