Designing a universal keyboard using chording gloves

Abstract

A universal input device for both text and Braille input was developed in a Glove-typed interface using all the joints of the four fingers and thumbs of both hands. The glove-typed device works as of now for input of Korean characters, numbers, and Braille characters using mode conversion. Considering the finger force and the fatigue from repeated finger motions, the input switch was made of conductible silicon ink, which is easy to apply to any type of surface, light, and enduring. The usability testing with (1) blind subjects showed the performance matching with a commercial Braille keypad, and (2) non-blind subjects for Korean characters showed comparable performance with cellular phone input keypads, but inferior to conventional keyboard. Subjects' performance showed that the chording gloves can input approximately 122 Braille characters per minute and 108 words per minute in Korean character. The chording gloves developed in our study is expected to be used with common computing devices such as PCs and PDAs, and can contribute to replacing the Braille-based note-takers with less expensive computing devices for blind users.

Handheld Haptic Display with Braille I/O

“…The experts (braille transcribers) could input 112.4 Bpm, and the error rate was 4.1 %. With OBOE, experts can achieve 80 % of the 135.9 Bpm input speed reported for chording gloves in [Lee et al, 2003]. This indicates that the braille input method with clear click feedback is an effective way to input commands to computers for mobile use.…”

TEXTile: Eyes-Free Text Input on Smart Glasses Using Touch Enabled Textile on the Forearm

“…The prototype is very cumbersome in some mobile contexts. Other works use thumb-to-fingers interaction, but by wearing a glove [23,34,35,36]. The more recent and advanced work is DigiTouch [36], which senses a continuous touch position and detects the thumb position along the length of a finger by using conductive fabric strips and a conductive patch on the thumb pad.…”

Student assessment in the ubiquitously connected world

“…The development of mobile devices and of more large scale physical gaming (particularly the Nintendo Wii console and the Kinect input system for the Microsoft X-Box 360 console) has produced an explosion of innovation in the field of input devices. For the purposes of wearable computing and invisible input, developments in glove-based chording keyboards, where very slight movements of the hands can be interpreted as input signals, are particularly interesting (Lee et al , 2003). Other alternatives include various new text entry options using gestures such as UniGest (Castellucci & MacKenzie, 2008).…”