Analyzing the articulation features of children's touchscreen gestures

Children’s touchscreen interaction patterns are generally quite different from those of adults. In particular, it has been established that children’s gestures are recognized by existing algorithms with much lower accuracy than are adults’ gestures. Previous work has qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed adults’ gestures to promote improved recognition, but this has not been done for children’s gestures in the same systematic manner. We present an analysis of gestures elicited from 24 children (age 5 to 10 years old) and 27 adults in which we calculate geometric, kinematic, and relative articulation features of the gestures. We examine the effect of user age on 22 different gesture features to better understand how children’s gesturing abilities and behaviors differ between various age groups, and from adults. We discuss the implications of our findings and how they will contribute to creating new gesture recognition algorithms tailored specifically for children.

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