An Intuitive and Efficient Note Taking Method for Mobile Information Terminal with Single Stroke Drawing by User's Forefinger

Abstract

In our daily mobile environment, we often want to take notes to remember ideas or events. For such note taking, notepads or mobile phones are commonly used now but these tools are not so suitable to take note quickly or immediately in mobile environment. Users need their both hands to take notes with notepads. They can use mobile phones with single hand but it is usually time consuming work to take notes with key pressing on such mobile device. This paper introduces an efficient note taking method for mobile environment with single stroke drawing by user's forefinger. This method records the trajectory of the finger-tip on the arbitrary surface. In order to trace the trajectory, an optical sensor is put on the finger-tip. The experimental result shows that the input speed of the proposed method is as fast as that of the handwriting and is significantly faster than that of note taking with mobile phone. It is also found that showing a temporal change of drawn trajectory or showing a context while note taking improves the correct recall rate of the input text.