Givs: Fine-Grained Gesture Control for Mobile Devices in Driving Environments

New media and communication technologies like mobile devices are nowadays widely used everywhere for providing rich functionalities and highly personalized services. However, using such a device in a driving environment is still very inconvenient and unsafe to be controlled by the driver. The touchscreen operations are one major obstacle since multi-touchscreen is optimized for hand-held usage scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose to replace some most used touch operations with gesture controls for mobile devices in a driving environment. Gesture control is simple, more flexible and requires less eye focus, which makes it more suitable for in-vehicle usages. In this paper, we design Givs, a fully functional gesture control system for mobile devices in a driving environment. Givs leverages the latest motion sensing technology to enable ubiquitous and driving-friendly gestures. Compared to other off-the-shelf gesture recognition solutions, Givs is optimized for in-vehicle use cases and is designed to overcome various limitations caused by real driving conditions, including bumpy road conditions, significant noise introduced by car vibration and technical limitations of motion sensors. Our extensive in-vehicle tests and participant experience experiments demonstrate that Givs well assists users in accomplishing various types of tasks and support human-machine interaction in driving environments such as personal vehicle and public transport, with high accuracy and fast responsiveness, while promoting drivnig convenience and safety.