Investigating How Smartphone Movement is Affected by Body Posture

2018. Rachel Eardley, Anne Roudaut, Steve Gill & Stephen Thompson
CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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.

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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}
}