Design and Feasibility Study: Customized Virtual Buttons for Electronic Mobile Devices

Seungtaek SONG  Namhyun KIM  Sungkil LEE  Joyce Jiyoung WHANG  Jinkyu LEE  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E102-A   No.4   pp.668-671
Publication Date: 2019/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E102.A.668
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Algorithms and Data Structures
Keyword: 
virtual buttons,  mobile devices,  accelerometer,  gyroscope,  design and feasibility study,  

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Summary: 
Smartphone users often want to customize the positions and functions of physical buttons to accommodate their own usage patterns; however, this is unfeasible for electronic mobile devices based on COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) due to high production costs and hardware design constraints. In this letter, we present the design and implementation of customized virtual buttons that are localized using only common built-in sensors of electronic mobile devices. We develop sophisticated strategies firstly to detect when a user taps one of the virtual buttons, and secondly to locate the position of the tapped virtual button. The virtual-button scheme is implemented and demonstrated in a COTS-based smartphone. The feasibility study shows that, with up to nine virtual buttons on five different sides of the smartphone, the proposed virtual buttons can operate with greater than 90% accuracy.