HandPad: Make Your Hand an On-the-go Writing Pad via Human Capacitance

The convenient text input system is a pain point for devices such as AR glasses, and it is difficult for existing solutions to balance portability and efficiency. This paper introduces HandPad, the system that turns the hand into an on-the-go touchscreen, which realizes interaction on the hand via human capacitance. HandPad achieves keystroke and handwriting inputs for letters, numbers, and Chinese characters, reducing the dependency on capacitive or pressure sensor arrays. Specifically, the system verifies the feasibility of touch point localization on the hand using the human capacitance model and proposes a handwriting recognition system based on Bi-LSTM and ResNet. The transfer learning-based system only needs a small amount of training data to build a handwriting recognition model for the target user. Experiments in real environments verify the feasibility of HandPad for keystroke (accuracy of 100%) and handwriting recognition for letters (accuracy of 99.1%), numbers (accuracy of 97.6%) and Chinese characters (accuracy of 97.9%).

In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology