A Japanese Software Keyboard for Tablets that Reduces User Fatigue
Teppei Yajima, Hiroshi Hosobe · 2018
Increasingly more people are using tablets for various tasks such as browsing websites, reading and writing email messages, making notes, and even creating business documents, for which they often need to enter text. When people enter text with tablets, they usually use software keyboards on the touch screens of the tablets. Unlike hardware keyboards that normally allow users to put their fingertips on keys, software keyboards require users to keep their fingertips in the air except when they actually perform input by tapping the screens, which may cause fatigue to the users. In this paper, we propose a Japanese software keyboard for tablets that reduces user fatigue. Our software keyboard allows its user to put his/her fingertips on the touch screen by distinguishing the user's intended tapping from his/her touching the screen without intending to input. We evaluated the keyboard by conducting a user study that compared it with a software keyboard based on normal tapping. The results of the user study show that our software keyboard caused less fatigue to the users in several regions of their bodies than the normal keyboard, although it resulted in a longer average time length and a worse average error rate of the users' text entry.