Smart-rings are well-suited for subtle, always-available haptic notifications due to their direct skin contact. While previous research has shown the feasibility of haptic technology in smart-rings using limited finger locations, the potential of poking to convey richer information has been underexplored. Through three studies involving 76 participants, the design of PokeRing was developed, a smart-ring that stimulates eight locations around the index finger’s proximal phalanx. The evaluation demonstrated PokeRing’s performance in realistic conditions (standing and walking) and its effectiveness in conveying information using twenty-one spatio-temporal patterns created by six interaction designers. Additionally, three applications utilizing PokeRing’s notification capabilities are presented.
Seungwoo Je, Minkyeong Lee, Yoonji Kim, Liwei Chan, Xing-Dong Yang, and Andrea Bianchi. 2018. PokeRing: Notifications by Poking Around the Finger. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 542, 10 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174116