Masktrap: Designing and Identifying Gestures to Transform Mask Strap into an Input Interface

Embedding technology into day-to-day wearables and creating smart devices such as smartwatches and smart-glasses has been a growing area of interest. In this paper, we explore the interaction around face masks, a common accessory worn by many to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Particularly, we propose a method of using the straps of a face mask as an input medium. We identified a set of plausible gestures on mask straps through an elicitation study (N = 20), in which the participants proposed different gestures for a given referent. We then developed a prototype to identify the gestures performed on the mask straps and present the recognition accuracy from a user study with eight participants. Our results show the system achieves 93.07% classification accuracy for 12 gestures.