Nosype: A Novel Nose-tip Tracking-based Text Entry System for Smartphone Users with Clinical Disabilities for Touch-based Typing

Abstract

Smartphones are ubiquitous nowadays, be it for setting a reminder, quick messaging, or an email reply, which requires typing through a soft-keyboard. However, people with medical issues like dactylitis, sarcopenia, joint pains might feel difficulty in typing, using the conventional approach. Existing gaze or voice-based approaches do not work well without commercial trackers or in noisy environments. In this paper, we develop a novel technique called Nosype, a contact-free text entry system for such users. Nosype's core functionality lies in nose-tip tracking and projection and allows the users to draw alphanumeric characters in the air for constructing a text. With 11 users with different clinical conditions, on a lab-scale, we observe that Nosype can help in typing with an average typing error rate of 6.9% and a typing-speed of 6.31 words/minute. A large-scale usability study with 60 participants, including 10 participants having clinical disabilities, shows an average usability score of 77.708.