MagController: A System for Touchless Mobile Devices Control Using the Magnetic Field

Heba Abdelnasser, Ayman Khalafallah, Moustafa Youssef

Abstract: A lot of improvements have been proposed in mobile computing devices, especially the wearable devices, in recent years. However, the input techniques remain a key challenge. One of the main methods for interacting with small screen devices today is the inflexible and error-prone touch-screen. In this paper, we propose MagController: a magnetic-based input technique that offers users wireless, unpowered, and high precision input for computing devices. The core idea is to leverage the triaxial magnetometer embedded in standard devices to accurately recognize a magnet different control actions. MagController also provides a number of modules that allow it to cope with background magnetic noise, heterogeneous devices, different magnet shapes, sizes, and strengths, as well as changes in magnet orientations. Our implementation of MagController on Android phones with extensive evaluation in wide range of environmental conditions scenarios shows that it can detect the magnet orientation with accuracy of more than 98%. In addition, MagController can recognize the magnetic actions with accuracy of 97% in different magnet's orientations relative to the device. This accuracy is robust with different phones and magnets, highlighting MagController's promise as an input technique for computing devices.