Investigating Pressure-based Interactions with Mobile Phones While Walking and Encumbered
Shimin Feng, Graham Wilson, Alex Ng, Stephen Anthony Brewster · 2015
In encumbered (e.g. carrying shopping bags) and walking situations, interacting with mobile phones is physically demanding and leads to poor input performance. This paper presents two user studies which investigate the effectiveness of using pressure as an alternative input modality to touch when using mobile phones while walking and encumbered. Force-sensing resistors (FSR) were placed around the edges of a mobile phone to provide multiple pressure points to execute onscreen spreading, pinching, rotating and dragging single handedly. Experimental results showed that it is possible that encumbrance had no significant effect on pressure-based targeting performance. Our preliminary findings show promise with using multi-digit pressure input to facilitate one-handed touchless interactions with handheld devices in multitasking encumbered contexts.