HeadText: Exploring Hands-free Text Entry using Head Gestures by Motion Sensing on a Smart Earpiece

Abstract

Fig. 1. Application scenarios of HeadText. Fig.a shows that users could perform head gestures to respond to messages when they are eating and their hands are holding the cake. Fig. b presents that a user could use HeadText to input text on a smart watch, whose text entry is originally limited due to the small screen size. Fig.c shows that HeadText could be utilized to help users with motor impairments for text entry. Fig. d presents the application scenario where users could perform head gestures for text entry on the smart glass which is private and socially acceptable in public. We present HeadText, a hands-free technique on a smart earpiece for text entry by motion sensing. Users input text utilizing only head gestures for key selection, word selection, word commitment and word cancelling tasks. Head gesture recognition is supported by motion sensing on a smart earpiece to capture head moving signals and machine learning algorithms (K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN)with a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance measurement). A 10-participant user study proved that HeadText could recognize head gestures at an accuracy of 94.29%. After that, the second user study presented that HeadText could achieve a maximum accuracy