In a previous post, we discussed our ongoing work on studying children’s gestures. We studied a corpus of children’s and adults’ gestures and analyzed 22 different articulation features, which we are pleased to announce has been accepted for publication at the 2016 ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI). Our paper, “Analyzing the Articulation Features of Children’s Touchscreen Gestures”, describes how children’s gestures differ from ages 5 to 10, and compares them to the features of adults’ gestures. This paper includes our project team: me (Alex Shaw) and Dr. Lisa Anthony. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

Children’s touchscreen interaction patterns are generally quite different from those of adults. In particular, it is known that children’s gestures are recognized by existing algorithms with much lower accuracy than those of adults. 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 metrics to better understand how children’s gesturing abilities and behaviors differ between various age groups. We discuss the implications of our findings and how they will contribute to creating new gesture recognition algorithms tailored specifically for children.

The camera-ready version of the paper is available here. We will present the paper at the upcoming ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Tokyo, Japan. We will post our presentation slides after the conference. See more information at our project website.