RingByte: Enhancing Text-Entry Practicality via A Singular Wearable Rotating Smart Ring

DOI

Mobile text-entry systems play an important role in various smart devices in real-life scenarios, including working, communication, studying, and entertainment. However, existing text-entry methods either require both hands to operate or have specific target operational requirements, making them impractical and prone to privacy leakage for interactive interfaces, smart appliances, and AR/VR scenarios without touch-based keyboards. In this paper, we propose and implement a singular wearable rotating smart ring text-entry system named RingByte. The key idea of RingByte lies in its rotating interaction design, featuring a rotating outer ring and a stable inner ring, which enables the creation of a novel text-entry method for enhancing practicality. Additionally, we propose a cross-domain attention neural network combined with a weighted allocator to address domain adaptation challenges, accounting for variations in both different individual and different finger characteristics. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that RingByte achieves user-friendly operation, relatively fast input speed, low error rates, and broad applicability across multiple scenarios. Meanwhile, RingByte outperforms four baseline methods and exhibits high accuracy input performance in both cross-person (96.9%) and cross-finger (96.8%) scenarios. These results highlight the excellent practicality, privacy-preserving features, and versatility of RingByte as a text-entry interaction system, making it a promising solution for diverse contexts.