Preventing Undesired Face-Touches With Wearable Devices and Haptic Feedback

Authors:
Open Access
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The alarming morbidity of COVID-19 has drawn the attention to the social role of hygiene rules, with a particular focus on the importance of limiting face-touch occurrences. To deal with this aspect, we present No Face-Touch, a system able to estimate hand proximity to face and notify the user whenever a face-touch movement is detected. In its complete setup, the system consists of an application running on the smartwatch and a wearable accessory. Its ease of implementation allows this solution to be ready-to-use and large-scale deployable. We developed two gesture detection approaches compatible with sensors embedded in recent smartwatches, i.e. inertial and magnetic sensors. After preliminary tests to tune target gesture parameters, we tested the two approaches and compared their accuracy. The final phase of this project consisted in exploiting the most robust approach in a daily living scenario during a 6-days campaign. Experimental results revealed the effectiveness of the proposed system, demonstrating its impact in reducing the number of face-touches and their duration.
Funding Information
  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (RAS-SIGHT) Humanitarian Project, No Face-Touch: an Open Project to Limit the COVID-19 Outbreak

This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit: