gesturePTS: Using Predetermined Time Systems (PTS) from Human Factors Engineering for coding gesture proposals from elicitation studies

Coding the gestures people use when interacting with tangible devices can aid interface design by making interfaces more intuitive and consistent. Past work devotes very little space to developing coding schemes for user-defined gesture sets. A generalizable coding scheme for gestures made by the human hand is developed for tangible devices using inspiration from predetermined time systems (PTS) from human factors engineering. The coding scheme is generic, adaptable to any hand motion proposal and has features such as duration invariance. Case study examples demonstrate its ability to provide consistent labels for hand interactions with tangible devices. Coding scheme labels are also balanced, having neither too many nor too few distinct gestures. This paper can help teach and create coding schemes for gesture elicitation studies performed by human-computer interaction researchers. The larger societal impact of this work is to help advance scientific methods for beneficial interface design within HCI/HRI by combination with human factors theory.