Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface

Chris Harrison, Desney Tan, Dan Morris

Summarized & Presented by:Reem Alattas

Skinput

• A technology that appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission, allowing the skin to be used as an input surface.

Introduction

• Handheld devices– Size vs. Computational Power

• Alternative interaction methods

Related Work

• Always-Available Input– Skin– Computer Vision– Speech Input– Wearable Computing• Glove-based Input• Smart Fabric• SixthSense

• Computationally expensive

• Error prone in mobile scenarios

• Limited precision • Privacy and

scalability issues

Related Work

• Bio-Sensing– Brain sensing technologies• EEG• fNIR

Skinput

• An input technique that allows the skin to be used as a finger input surface.

Bio-Acoustics

• Transverse wave propagation

• Longitudinal wave propagation

Sensing

• An array of highly tuned vibration sensors

Processing

Experiment

• 13 Participants (7 females)• Seattle area• Age range: 20 – 56 (mean 38.3)• BMI range: 20.5 (normal) – 31.9 (obese)• 1 lefty

Experimental Conditions

• Fingers (Five Locations)• Whole Arm (Five Locations)• Forearm (Ten Locations)

Procedure

• Participants practiced tapping approximately one minute with each gesture set.

• Participants were instructed to comfortably tap each location ten times, with a finger of their choosing.– 3 rounds of training data were collected per input

location set (30 examples per location, 150 data points total)

– Forearm Exception: two rounds were collected (20 examples per location, 200 data points total)

Results

• Five Fingers– Average accuracy 87.7%

• Whole Arm– Below elbow average accuracy 95.5%– Above elbow average accuracy 88.3%

• Forearm– Average accuracy 81.5%

Accuracy

BMI Effects

• High BMI is correlated with decreased accuracies.

Supplemental Experiments

• Walking and Jogging• Single-Handed Gestures• Surface and Object Recognition• Identification of Finger Tap Type• Segmenting Finger Input

Conclusion

• The proposed approach appropriates the human body as an input surface.

Questions