Keep the Phone in Your Pocket: Enabling Smartphone Operation with an IMU Ring for Visually Impaired People

Previous studies have shown that visually impaired users face a unique set of pain points in smartphone interaction including locating and removing the phone from a pocket, two-handed interaction while holding a cane, and keeping personal data private in a public setting. In this paper, we present a ring-based input interaction that enables in-pocket smartphone operation. By wearing a ring with an Inertial Measurement Unit on the index finger, users can perform gestures on any surface (e.g., tables, thighs) using subtle, one-handed gestures and receive auditory feedback via earphones. We conducted participatory studies to obtain a set of versatile commands and corresponding gestures. We subsequently trained an SVM model to recognize these gestures and achieved a mean accuracy of 95.5% on 15 classifications. Evaluation results showed that our ring interaction is more efficient than some baseline phone interactions and is easy, private, and fun to use.