Hands-free input devices for wearable computers

Abstract

The advent of wearable computers marks a potential revolution in human-machine interaction and necessitates an expansion of control and display capabilities. Several emerging technologies can provide operators with a variety of new channels for interacting with wearable computers. Enabling technologies use signals from the brain, muscles, voice, lips, head position, eye position, and gestures for the control of computers. These hands-free, head-up controllers may be required to fully exploit the advantages of wearable computers. This paper describes several hands-free controllers that are candidate input devices, either individually or as part of a multimodal interface. Controller design, task-controller mapping and other application issues are also presented.