Virtual Keyboard with Gyroscope Sensor of Smartwatch

Abstract

Both keyboard and watch are widely used equipments that makes human life convenient. First, a keyboard is an input device that helps interaction between human and computer. We usually make use of keyboard, one of the most proper tools to represent human language, to express our intent to target device. Next, a watch has been played an important role for human life so that the people can wear it on their wrist and check exact time anywhere, anytime. Besides providing exact time to user, a watch has been improved with additional features like stop watch, alarm. A smartwatch, which is the cutting edge technology in watch field, has quite good processing power, capabilities of communication and supports several in-built sensor so that expected to have great potentiality. This paper proposes a system called Virtual Keyboard that uses the in-built gyroscope in smartwatches to recognize human key typing motion. When an user wearing smartwatch on her wrist tries to make typing motion on any surface, for instance, desk, the watch collects gyroscope data. Our system leverages the data to predict the behavior of wrist, classify the intended key, and generate proper virtual keystrokes to target devices. We implemented our virtual keyboard module on LG watch Urbane platform, and evaluated the performance of system with a few reasonable constraints. Results show that English characters can be identified by reducing candidates into maximum 2, with an average accuracy of 45.1%. In this research, we obviously found the possibility of the whole new way to provide alphabet input with smartwatch. Future work is focused on refining the prototype of our system. We are planning to get rid of several constraints iteratively with the goal of offering a new user-experience that complements keyboards and touch-screens.