Blowatch: Blowable and Hands-free Interaction for Smartwatches

The emergence of smart devices promises to bring enhanced convenience to common communication and information retrieval tasks. However, disabled users often have trouble operating touch sceens. We introduce Blowatch, a novel input method for smartwatches and potentially for other mobile devices, which provides hands-free interaction and avoid the occlusion problem. Users blow air on the smartwatches so as to invoke several operations, such as adjusting the music volume, taking a picture or answering the call. In this paper, we explore the input dimension of blowing-gesture set and examine potential usage of the gestures with a simple user study. Finally, to illustrate the potential of our approach, we developed a series of example applications for our blow-based gestures.