ABSTRACT
Touchscreen devices have become increasingly popular. Yet they lack of tactile feedback and motor stability, making it difficult effectively typing on virtual keyboards. This is even worse for elderly users and their declining motor abilities, particularly hand tremor. In this paper we examine text-entry performance and typing patterns of elderly users on touch-based devices. Moreover, we analyze users' hand tremor profile and its relationship to typing behavior. Our main goal is to inform future designs of touchscreen keyboards for elderly people. To this end, we asked 15 users to enter text under two device conditions (mobile and tablet) and measured their performance, both speed- and accuracy-wise. Additionally, we thoroughly analyze different types of errors (insertions, substitutions, and omissions) looking at touch input features and their main causes. Results show that omissions are the most common error type, mainly due to cognitive errors, followed by substitutions and insertions. While tablet devices can compensate for about 9% of typing errors, omissions are similar across conditions. Measured hand tremor largely correlates with text-entry errors, suggesting that it should be approached to improve input accuracy. Finally, we assess the effect of simple touch models and provide implications to design.
- Bain et al. Assessing the impact of essential tremor on upper limb function. Journal of neurology, 241(1):54--61, 1993.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bergstrom-Lehtovirta et al. The effects of walking speed on target acquisition on a touchscreen interface. In Proc. of MHCI'11, 143--146, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chung et al. Usability evaluation of numeric entry tasks on keypad type and age. International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 40(1):97--105, 2010.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Elble and Koller. Tremor. Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore, 1990.Google Scholar
- Findlater and Wobbrock. Personalized input: Improving ten-finger touchscreen typing through automatic adaptation. In Proc. of CHI'12, 815--824, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Froehlich et al. Barrier pointing: using physical edges to assist target acquisition on mobile device touch screens. In Proc. of ASSETS'07, 19--26, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Goetz et al. Movement disorder society-sponsored revision of the unified parkinson's disease rating scale (mds-updrs): Scale presentation and clinimetric testing results. Movement disorders, 23(15):2129--2170, 2008.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gunawardana et al. Usability guided key-target resizing for soft keyboards. In Proc. of IUI'10, 111--118, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jin et al. Touch screen user interfaces for older adults: button size and spacing. Universal Acess in Human Computer Interaction. Coping with Diversity, 933--941, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kristensson. Five challenges for intelligent text entry methods. AI Magazine, 30(4):85, 2009.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kurniawan. Older people and mobile phones: A multi-method investigation. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 66(12):889--901, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- MacKenzie and Soukoreff. Text entry for mobile computing: Models and methods, theory and practice. Human-Computer Interaction, 17(2):147--198, 2002.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nicolau and Jorge. Touch typing using thumbs: understanding the effect of mobility and hand posture. In Proc. of CHI '12, 2683--2686, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Salarian et al. Quantification of tremor and bradykinesia in parkinson's disease using a novel ambulatory monitoring system. Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 54(2):313--322, 2007.Google Scholar
- Selker et al. Psychosocial indicators via hand tremor. In Proc. of INTERACT'11, 596--599, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Strickland and Bertoni. Parkinson's prevalence estimated by a state registry. Movement disorders, 19(3):318--323, 2004.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wacharamanotham et al. Evaluating swabbing: a touchscreen input method for elderly users with tremor. In Proc. of CHI'11, 623--626, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wobbrock et al. EdgeWrite: a stylus-based text entry method designed for high accuracy and stability of motion. In Proc. of UIST'03, 70, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Elderly text-entry performance on touchscreens
Recommendations
TabLETS Get Physical: Non-Visual Text Entry on Tablet Devices
CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsTablet devices can display full-size QWERTY keyboards similar to the physical ones. Yet, the lack of tactile feedback and the inability to rest the fingers on the home keys result in a highly demanding and slow exploration task for blind users. We ...
Tablets, tabletops, and smartphones: cross-platform comparisons of children’s touchscreen interactions
ICMI '17: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal InteractionThe proliferation of smartphones and tablets has increased children’s access to and usage of touchscreen devices. Prior work on smartphones has shown that children’s touch interactions differ from adults’. However, larger screen devices like tablets ...
Blind people and mobile touch-based text-entry: acknowledging the need for different flavors
ASSETS '11: The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibilityThe emergence of touch-based mobile devices brought fresh and exciting possibilities. These came at the cost of a considerable number of novel challenges. They are particularly apparent with the blind population, as these devices lack tactile cues and ...
Comments