Investigating How Smartphone Movement is Affected by Body Posture

Rachel Eardley, Anne Roudaut, Steve Gill & Stephen Thompson. 2018.

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

We present an investigation into how hand usage is affected by different body postures (Sitting at a table, Lying down and Standing) when interacting with smartphones. We theorize a list of factors (smartphone support, body support and muscle usage) and explore their influence the tilt and rotation of the smartphone. From this we draw a list of hypotheses that we investigate in a quantitative study. We varied the body postures and grips (Symmetric bimanual, Asymmetric bimanual finger, Asymmetric bimanual thumb and Single-handed) studying the effects through a dual pointing task. Our results showed that the body posture Lying down had the most movement, followed by Sitting at a table and finally Standing. We additionally generate reports of motions performed using different grips. Our work extends previous research conducted with multiple grips in a sitting position by including other body postures, it is anticipated that UI designers will use our results to inform the development of mobile user interfaces.

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Citation

Eardley, R., Roudaut, A., Gill, S., & Thompson, S. J. (2018). Investigating how smartphone movement is affected by body posture. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–8). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173776, doi:10.1145/3173574.3173776

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3173574.3173776, author = {Eardley, Rachel and Roudaut, Anne and Gill, Steve and Thompson, Stephen J.}, title = {Investigating How Smartphone Movement is Affected by Body Posture}, year = {2018}, isbn = {9781450356206}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173776}, doi = {10.1145/3173574.3173776}, abstract = {We present an investigation into how hand usage is affected by different body postures (Sitting at a table, Lying down and Standing) when interacting with smartphones. We theorize a list of factors (smartphone support, body support and muscle usage) and explore their influence the tilt and rotation of the smartphone. From this we draw a list of hypotheses that we investigate in a quantitative study. We varied the body postures and grips (Symmetric bimanual, Asymmetric bimanual finger, Asymmetric bimanual thumb and Single-handed) studying the effects through a dual pointing task. Our results showed that the body posture Lying down had the most movement, followed by Sitting at a table and finally Standing. We additionally generate reports of motions performed using different grips. Our work extends previous research conducted with multiple grips in a sitting position by including other body postures, it is anticipated that UI designers will use our results to inform the development of mobile user interfaces.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, pages = {1–8}, numpages = {8}, keywords = {standing, smartphone, mobile device, lying down, interaction, handgrip, grasp, design, body posture}, location = {Montreal QC, Canada}, series = {CHI '18} }