Paper Info
Title
Type, Talk, or Swype: Characterizing and comparing energy consumption of mobile input modalities.
Abstract
It is reported that mobile users spend most of their time on texting SMS, Social Networking, Emailing, or sending instant messaging (IM), all of which involve text input. There are three primary text input modalities, soft keyboard (SK), speech to text (STT) and Swype. Each one of them engages a different set of hardware and consequently consumes different amounts of battery energy. Using high-precision power measurement hardware and systematically taking into account the user context, we characterize and compare the energy consumption of these three input modalities. We find that the length of interaction, or the message length, determines the most energy efficient modality. For short interactions, less than 14–30 characters, SK is the most energy efficient. For longer interactions, however, STT significantly outperforms both SK and Swype. When message length distributions of popular text activities are considered, STT provides near optimal energy consumption without requiring the user to predict the message length and decide between SK and STT. In terms of battery life, the choice of input modality makes significant differences. If users always choose SK for all their text activities, they will consume nearly 50% of the phone battery each day. Choosing STT over SK can save 30%–40% of the battery depending on the choice of STT software.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.pmcj.2015.10.010
Pervasive and Mobile Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Mobile computing,Text input modality,Energy consumption efficiency,User context,Recommendation
Journal
26
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
C
1574-1192
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
20
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fangzhou Jiang1124.44
Eisa Zarepour2215.09
MAHBUB HASSAN385690.96
Aruna Seneviratne41086121.47
Prasant Mohapatra54344304.46