SmartWriting: Pen-Holding Gesture Recognition with Smartwatch

Performing the correct pen-holding gesture plays an important role in handwriting efficiency and quality, especially for early education. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of SmartWriting, which utilizes the smartwatch for pen-holding gesture recognition for both Chinese and English writing. SmartWriting can automatically identify whether the user is writing Chinese or English, based on which two classifiers are built to detect pen-holding gestures by strokes in Chinese characters or English letters. In particular, we propose to leverage the combined signal of one vertical stroke and one horizontal stroke for efficient pen-holding gesture identification in Chinese writing, and we are able to infer pen-holding gesture according to any letter in English writing. We build a fully functional prototype of SmartWriting, and extensive experiments confirm its effectiveness and robustness. The detection accuracy is 9. % and 9 % for Chinese and English respectively. SmartWriting provides a natural, convenient and inexpensive way to improve users' writing habits.