My colleagues, Radu-Daniel Vatavu and Quincy Brown, and I, have combined our efforts on exploring touch interaction for children on a paper which has been accepted to the INTERACT 2015 conference! The paper, titled “Child or Adult? Inferring Smartphone Users’ Age Group from Touch Measurements Alone,” showed the results of our experiments to classify whether a user is a young child (ages 3 to 6) or an adult from properties of their touch input alone. Radu used his dataset of 3 to 6 year olds and supplemented with our MTAGIC dataset. The abstract is as follows:
We present a technique that classifies users’ age group, i.e., child or adult, from touch coordinates captured on touch-screen devices. Our technique delivered 86.5% accuracy (user-independent) on a dataset of 119 participants (89 children ages 3 to 6) when classifying each touch event one at a time and up to 99% accuracy when using a window of 7+ consecutive touches. Our results establish that it is possible to reliably classify a smartphone user on the fly as a child or an adult with high accuracy using only basic data about their touches, and will inform new, automatically adaptive interfaces for touch-screen devices.
You can download the camera-ready version of the paper here. Radu will be presenting our work at INTERACT, which will be held in Bamberg, Germany, in September. I’ll post the talk when available!
Lisa Anthony 