SKInteract: An on-body interaction system based on skin-texture recognition

Prätorius Manuel, Scherzinger Aaron, Hinrichs Klaus

Abstract

In this paper we propose SkInteract, a system for on-body interaction utilizing the diverse texture of the human skin. We use an area fingerprint sensor to capture images and locate the corresponding area within a previously created map of the skin surface. In addition to the location of the sensor it is possible to calculate its orientation with respect to the reference map. This allows to assign arbitrary semantics to areas of the user’s skin and to use the rotation as an additional input modality. In order to evaluate the feasibility of SkInteract a user study with a preliminary prototype was conducted. We propose two different interaction concepts which are based on either attaching a fixed sensor to a wearable device or using a moveable sensor, for instance attached to a pen, to perform on-body input.