Head and Shoulders Gestures: Exploring User-Defined Gestures with Upper Body

This paper presents empirical results about user-defined gestures for head and shoulders by analyzing 308 gestures elicited from 22 participants for 14 referents materializing 14 different types of tasks in IoT context of use. We report an overall medium consensus but with medium variance (mean: .263, min: .138, max: .390 on the unit scale) between participants gesture proposals, while their thinking time were less similar (min: 2.45 s, max: 22.50 s), which suggests that head and shoulders gestures are not all equally easy to imagine and to produce. We point to the challenges of deciding which head and shoulders gestures will become the consensus set based on four criteria: the agreement rate, their individual frequency, their associative frequency, and their unicity.