Swabbing: Touchscreen Input for Users with Hand Tremor

What is Swabbing?

Swabbing is an input that allows users with hand tremor to select a target on touchscreen more accurate despite the jittering hand movement. The users slide their finger towards a target on an edge of the screen. Then, a linear regression is calculated from input points to determine a target. The support from the screen surface, the absence of breaking, and the smoothing effect of linear regression make the selection more accurate.

The Team

Swabbing is a research project by Chat Wacharamanotham, Alexander Mertens, Martin Kronenbuerger, Christopher Schlick, and Jan Borchers. This project is a collaboration between the Media Computing Group, the Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics, and the University Hospital Aachen. The team also comprises several thesis students and HiWis:

• Jan Hurtmanns
• Alexandru Popa
• Neils Huck?
• Philipp Wacker
• Zhao He

Publications

2011

	Chat Wacharamanotham, Alexandru Popa, Alexander Mertens, Christopher Schlick, and Jan Borchers. Tracking Tremor On and Over A Touchscreen. In CHI 2011 Workshop on Dynamic Accessibility: Detecting and Accommodating Differences in Ability and Situation, Vancouver, Canada, May 2011. .
	Alexander Mertens, Chatchavan Wacharamanotham, Jan Hurtmanns, Niels Huck, and Jörg Schulz and. SWABBING: Touchscreen-basierte Mensch-Rechner-Interaktion für Personen mit Tremorerkrankungen des Hand-Arm-Apparats. das wissenschaftliche Programm des Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Neurologie (DGN), September 2011. (accepted for poster presentation), .
	Chat Wacharamanotham, Jan Hurtmanns, Alexander Mertens, Martin Kronenbuerger, Christopher Schlick, and Jan Borchers. Evaluating Swabbing: a Touchscreen Input Method for Elderly Users with Tremor. In CHI '11: Proceedings of the twenty-ninth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM Press. .

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