ViFin: Harness Passive Vibration to Continuous Micro Finger Writing with a Commodity Smartwatch

Wearable devices, such as smartwatches and head-mounted devices (HMD), demand new input devices for a natural, subtle, and easy-to-use way to input commands and text. In this paper, we propose and investigate ViFin, a new technique for input commands and text entry, which harness finger movement induced vibration to track continuous micro finger-level writing with a commodity smartwatch. Inspired by the recurrent neural aligner and transfer learning, ViFin recognizes continuous finger writing, works across different users, and achieves an accuracy of 90% and 91% for recognizing numbers and letters, respectively. We quantify our approach's accuracy through real-time system experiments in different arm positions, writing speeds, and smartwatch position displacements. Finally, a real-time writing system and two user studies on real-world tasks are implemented and assessed.