This Smartwatch Prototype Uses Your Wrist as a Joystick

In most cases, operating a smartwatch requires the use of both hands, which can become quite tedious if one hand isn’t free. With this in mind, a Dartmouth-led team has developed WristWhirl — a smartwatch prototype that uses the wrist wearing the device as an always-available joystick to perform common touchscreen gestures with one-handed continuous input.

As a proof of concept, WristWhirl was brought to life using a 2" TFT display as well as plastic watch strap augmented with 12 infrared proximity sensors and a piezo vibration sensor connected to an Arduino Due. The board then gets hooked to a laptop that reads the sensor data.

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.

Four use cases for WristWhirl were tested: a gesture shortcuts app that allowed users to access shortcuts by drawing gestures; a music player app that enabled 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 that were played using a combination of wrist swipes, wrist extension and wrist flexion.

You can read more about WristWhirl on Dartmouth’s page here, and check out the team’s demonstration below!