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Nailz: Sensing Hand Input with Touch Sensitive Nails

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Touches between the fingers of an unencumbered hand represent a ready-to-use, eyes-free and expressive input space suitable for interacting with wearable devices such as smart glasses or watches. While prior work has focused on touches to the inner surface of the hand, touches to the nails, a practical site for mounting sensing hardware, have been comparatively overlooked. We extend prior implementations of single touch sensing nails to a full set of five and explore their potential for wearable input. We present design ideas and an input space of 144 touches (taps, flicks and swipes) derived from an ideation workshop. We complement this with data from two studies characterizing the subjective comfort and objective characteristics (task time, accuracy) of each touch. We conclude by synthesizing this material into a set of 29 viable nail touches, assessing their performance in a final study and illustrating how they could be used by presenting, and qualitatively evaluating, two example applications.

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  • (2024)Exploring the Affordances of Bio-Electronic NailsCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3681952(360-365)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
10688 pages
ISBN:9781450367080
DOI:10.1145/3313831
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 23 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. eyes-free
  2. finger input
  3. touch sensing fingernail
  4. wearable

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  • Research-article

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  • National Research Foundation of Korea

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2025)Engaging with the making and the end-of-life of artificial interactive nailsProceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3689050.3707682(1-5)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2025
  • (2025)Microgesture + GraspInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2024.103398195:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Exploring the Affordances of Bio-Electronic NailsCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3681952(360-365)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Impact of Fingernails Length on Mobile Tactile InteractionProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642037(1-21)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Skinergy: Machine-Embroidered Silicone-Textile Composites as On-Skin Self-Powered Input SensorsProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586183.3606729(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
  • (2023)ChromaNails: Re-Programmable Multi-Colored High-Resolution On-Body Interfaces using Photochromic Nail PolishAdjunct Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586182.3615824(1-5)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
  • (2023)ThumbAirProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35694746:4(1-30)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Augmenting On-Body Touch Input with Tactile Feedback Through Fingernail HapticsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581473(1-13)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)µGlyph: a Microgesture NotationProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580693(1-28)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)TetraForce: A Magnetic-Based Interface Enabling Pressure Force and Shear Force Input Applied to Front and Back of a SmartphoneProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35677176:ISS(185-206)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2022
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