Four Replications of a User-Defined Gesture Study with Smart Rings

Presented at MobileHCI '25. See https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3737821.3749582
Empirical findings in gesture-based interaction often stem from highly controlled experimental settings, which raises concerns about their generalizability. To explore how variations in such settings influence discoveries on user-defined gestures, we selected an end-user elicitation study involving smart rings that had been replicated at least once. By reusing the same stimuli, equipment, and data collection method, we conducted four new replications of the original study, involving a total of 120 participants across four different research teams. Our results show that smart ring gestures elicited in these replications overlap only partially, with differences in agreement rate, thinking time, and goodness of fit with corresponding system functions. We argue that systematic replication of gesture elicitation studies is essential for generalizable gesture sets

1. MobileHCI2025
The 27th ACM International Conferenceon Mobile Human-Computer Interaction
SharmEl-Sheikh, Egypt, 22 September-25 September2025
Four Replications of a User-Defined Gesture Study with Smart Rings
Jean Vanderdonckt, Radu-Daniel Vatavu
Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium& Stefan celMare Univ. of Suceava, Romania
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Our four replications of a gesture elicitation study
1) Start from an original Gesture Elicitation Study (Gheran et al., 2018)
24 participants X 14 referents = 336 gesture proposals with Ring Zero (LogBar)
Consensus set
Agreement rate
2) Replicate the original study with another method (Gheran et al., 2023)
3) Replicate the original study with same method, different populations, sampling, experimental setup and team