"While other studies have explored the use of one-handed continuous gestures using smartwatches, WristWhirl is the first to explore gestural input. Technology like ours shows what smartwatches may be able to do in the future, by allowing users to interact with the device using one hand (the one that the watch is worn on) while freeing up the other hand for other tasks," said assistant professor Xing-Dong Yang.
To measure the accuracy of the free-form shapes, such as a triangle, drawn using Wrist-Whirl, researchers used the gesture recogniser and found that it could recognise the marks with a 93.8% accuracy as compared to 85% accuracy by three human inspectors.
WristWhirl was built from a 2in TFT display as well as a plastic watch strap augmented with 12 infrared proximity sensors and a Piezo vibration sensor connected to an Arduino DUE board.
Four usage scenarios for WristWhirl were tested: a gesture shortcuts app which allowed users to access shortcuts by drawing gestures; a music player app, which allowed users to scroll through songs with wrist swipes and play a selected song by double tapping the thumb and index fingers; a map app for which 2D maps could be panned and zoom option used depending on where the watch was held in relation to one's body; and game apps, such as Tetris, which was played using a combination of wrist swipes, wrist extension and wrist flexion.