A Smartphone System: Providing a Shoe-Embedded Interface

摘要

Although a handsfree man-machine interface is useful when the user's hands are not free, existing handsfree input devices are not the type of device that are normally worn by people. We focus on a shoe as an input device because people normally wear it when they go out, and propose a shoe- embedded interface. The input device is a sensor shoe. Weight sensors are attached at three positions on a sole: the first metatarsal, the fifth metatarsal, and the calcaneal tuberosity. These positions have been selected based on the characteristics of the human foot skeleton. Two types of foot operation have been used: tap and push. By combining these operations, 10 commands have been defined. The sensor shoe houses an insole with hetero-core optical fiber sensor elements attached to it. These elements are sensitive to weight. We have built an experimental system that runs on a smartphone and provides the shoe-embedded interface, and conducted experiments with three test subjects to evaluate the system. The average rate of successful command identification was 89%.