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Why is gesture typing promising for older adults? comparing gesture and tap typing behavior of older with young adults

  • Yu Hao Lin
  • , Suwen Zhu
  • , Yu Jung Ko
  • , Wenzhe Cui
  • , Xiaojun Bi
  • Stony Brook University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Gesture typing has been a widely adopted text entry method on touchscreen devices. We have conducted a study to understand whether older adults could gesture type, how they type, what are the strengths and weaknesses of gesture typing, and how to further improve it. By logging stroke-level interaction data and leveraging the existing modeling tools, we compared the gesture and tap typing behavior of older adults with young adults. Our major finding is promising and encouraging. Gesture typing outperformed the typical tap typing for older adults, and was very easy for them to learn. The gesture typing input speed was 15.28% higher than that of tap typing for 14 older adults who had none gesture typing experience in the past. One of the main reasons was that older adults adopted the word-level inputting strategy in gesture typing, while often used the letter-level correction strategy in tap typing. Compared with young adults, older adults exhibited little degradation in gesture accuracy. Our study also led to implications on how to further improve gesture typing for older adults.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationASSETS 2018 - Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages271-281
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356503
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 8 2018
Event20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS 2018 - Galway, Ireland
Duration: Oct 22 2018Oct 24 2018

Publication series

NameASSETS 2018 - Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

Conference

Conference20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS 2018
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityGalway
Period10/22/1810/24/18

Keywords

  • Gesture typing
  • Older adults
  • Text Entry

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