WIRELESS IOT MOTION-RECOGNITION RINGS AND A PAPER KEYBOARD

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new scheme for implementing virtual keyboards, which uses only two to four motion-recognition rings per hand and a two-dimensional keyboard template (e.g., an A4 size paper with printed key positions). It has the benefit of portability, customizability, and low-cost when compared with existing approaches. Essentially, we have shown that wearing two wireless IoT rings on the middle phalanges of two fingers of each hand, users can input the alphabetic characters into a computing device by typing on a flat paper on a desk, and potentially in mid-air. We have demonstrated that two rings are sufficient in capturing the gestures and motions of all fingers in a typing hand for keystrokes recognition. A single wireless IoT ring, which weighs 7.8 grams, consists of a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) unit, a micro inertial measurement unit (mIMU), and a cell battery. The 3-axes attitude angles and the Z-axis acceleration of each ring are adopted as the features for keystroke recognition. The overall keystroke recognition accuracy rate can reach as high as 94.8% when two IoT rings are worn by a user on each hand; this accuracy rate increases to 98.6%, when four rings are worn on each typing hand.

Existing System

Vision-based virtual keyboards, wearable virtual keyboards

Proposed System

Our proposed paper-keyboard scheme is built based using wearable IoT rings. The key concept is to use MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) motion sensors to collect the motions of fingers while they undergo typing motions for different keystrokes. The basic hypothesis is that, during the typing motion of a particular key, a user will move some fingers towards to the key in a unique formation and direction, and hence, a special angular pattern in the time- series for typing each key can be detected by the IoT rings worn on specific fingers. When the “keys” on a paper are pressed, the motion sensing rings will collect and send the motion data to a mobile device or a computer through BLE, and subsequently, the typing motion data is sent to a remote server or PC via Cloud technology.

Architecture

BLOCK DIAGRAM