Design and development of a card‐sized virtual keyboard using permanent magnets and hall sensors

This paper proposes a method to distinguish the key-type of human fingers attached to small permanent magnets. The Hall sensors arrayed in the credit card-size area feel the distribution of the magnetic field due to the key-typing movement of the human fingers as if a keyboard exists, and the signal is analyzed using the genetic algorithm or the neural network algorithm to distinguish the typed keys. By this method, the keyboard can be miniaturized to credit card size (54 mm × 85 mm). We called this system “the virtual keyboard system.” © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 92(3): 32–37, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10043