The pen-computer interface based on force tablet: active information acquisition for human-computer-interaction

The use of pen as an effective communication interface to computer becomes an active research area in recent years. However, the lack of complete solutions for interchange between platforms has hampered its application as no efficient device can record the entire procedure of human handwriting behavior. In this paper, we design a force tablet (F-tablet) for human-computer-interaction (HCI), which can acquire the kinematics and kinetics information of human handwriting, including strokes of pen-up and pen-down, pen nib trajectory and three-axis forces of pen tip directly and simultaneously. Any stylus- and pen-like device can be used to write on it. The core part of the system, named as F-tablet, is introduced and its ink was defined according to UNIPEN and InkML format. Based on this pen-based input system, some modes in pen-computer interface for handwriting and note taking like click and cursor movement are presented. A simple application based on the pen interface was also designed for handwriting ability evaluation.