Exploratory evaluation of a planar foot-operated cursor-positioning device

The use of feet instead of hands to perform workstation cursor-positioning and related functions has been the subject of an on-going investigation. In the exploratory study reported here, a particular foot-operated device, the planar slide mole, was assessed against a mouse in a target-selection task. The study showed that novices can learn to select fairly small targets using a mole; for a target size of 1/8″ square, the response time equaled that of the mouse when keyboard homing time was taken into account.