Development of a Screen Keyboard System with Radially-Arranged Keys and its Effectiveness for Typing Including Eye-Gaze Input

This study aims to develop an effective screen-keyboard system from a new perspective of key arrangements. In the proposed screen keyboard system, keys are centralized by arranging them radially, with alphabetical keys arranged based on the articulation for speech production. A gesture input method and click input method are implemented considering the mora-based Japanese sound system with syllables containing a consonant-vowel (CV) structure. In a preliminary experiment, the cumulative pixel distances required to press keys for the input sequences were evaluated as a simulation to confirm the basic performance of the keyboard system. The Euclidean pixel distances between the keys on the keyboard images were accumulated and compared between the proposed keyboard system and a typical QWERTY keyboard. Typing experiments involving participants were performed to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed keyboard system. The experimental results reveal that the proposed screen keyboard system enables users to generate efficient typing performances using a computer mouse and eye gaze via short-term training. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.