FaceOff: Detecting Face Touching with a Wrist-Worn Accelerometer

08/04/2020

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by   Xiang 'Anthony' Chen, et al.

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According to the CDC, one key step of preventing oneself from contracting coronavirus (COVID-19) is to avoid touching eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands. However, touching one's face is a frequent and spontaneous behavior—one study observed subjects touching their faces on average 23 times per hour. Creative solutions have emerged amongst some recent commercial and hobbyists' projects, yet most either are closed-source or lack validation in performance. We develop FaceOff—a sensing technique using a commodity wrist-worn accelerometer to detect face-touching behavior based on the specific motion pattern of raising one's hand towards the face. We report a survey (N=20) that elicits different ways people touch their faces, an algorithm that temporally ensembles data-driven models to recognize when a face touching behavior occurs and results from a preliminary user testing (N=3 for a total of about 90 minutes).