FootUI: Designing and Detecting Foot Gestures to Assist People with Upper Body Motor Impairments to Use Smartphones on the Bed
Xiaozhu Hu, Jiting Wang, Weiwei Gao, Yongquan 'Owen' Hu · 2022
Some people with upper body motor impairments but sound lower limbs usually use feet to interact with smartphones. However, touching the touchscreen with big toes is tiring, inefficient and easy to mistouch. Targeting at this pain point, we propose FootUI, which leverages the phone camera to track users’ feet and translates the foot gestures to smartphone operations. This technique enables users to interact with smartphones while reclining on the bed and improves the comfort of users. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of the foot gestures through user studies as well as the development and evaluation of FootUI. Results show that toes-based foot gestures are not only less perceivable but also uncomfortable. FootUI avoid the use of toes-based gestures and is proved to be an easy, efficient and interesting input technique for people with upper body motor impairments but sound lower limbs.