A text entry technique for wrist-worn watches with tiny touchscreens

Abstract

We consider a text entry technique for wrist-worn watches with inch-scale touchscreens. Most of the watches which are commercially available, for example, Galaxy Gear, Omate, etc., have around 1.5-inch touchscreens that is too small for the shrinked Qwerty keyboard. Moreover, the virtual button-based techniques determine input-letters by distinguishing touched locations on touchscreens which continuously demands a user to carefully touch certain locations. Thus, they are not suitable to tiny-touchscreen devices in mobile environment. Instead, the proposed text entry technique allows a user to touch almost anywhere on the touchscreen for text entry by determining input-letters based on drag direction regardless of touched location. We implemented the proposed method on a commercial watch with 1.54-inch touchscreen for validating its feasibility.