Optimal Keypad for Small Devices

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

FYT Presentation and Demonstration

Title: "Optimal Keypad for Small Devices"

by

Mr. HONG Wa Lun, Warner

Abstract

With the popularity of small electronic gadgets such as mobile phones,
personal digital assistants (PDA), etc. there is a need to design an
efficient keypad for entering text.

In this paper, we believe that the current standard keypad configuration 
--- standard E.161 mobile phone keypad ---- may not be optimal and 
investigate two ways to achieve a better design. We call our method, the 
WAVE --- Wrap Around and an additional Vowel kEy approach. First, we 
require that the keypad is constrained so that the 26 letters on the keys 
are always in alphabetical order. Then we investigate (1) adding a 
separate vowel key which consists of the 5 vowel letters ("A", "E", "I", 
"O", and "U"), and (2) allowing the letters on the keys wrap around. We 
hypothesize that the keypad solutions generated by the new approach would 
facilitate the text entry performance by reducing disambiguation, and thus 
requiring few key presses to complete a written word on average.

Using the WAVE approach, we found keypad configurations that are better than
the standard E.161 mobile phone keypad and improve the disambiguation score
by 25%~75%.

Date		: April 29, 2009

Time		: 2-3pm

Venue		: 3530

Advisor 	: Dr. Brian Mak

2nd reader	: Prof. Pedro Sander


*********  All are welcome  ************