A Proximity Sensor Based No-Touch Mechanism for Mobile Applications on Smart Phones

Smart phones with touch screens have become very popular and have changed our behaviors of using handsets. However, using touch screens is not safe for mobile phone users especially when they are driving cars. Thus, many applications using smart phones cannot be initiated because users who are driving the cars cannot easily touch the small icons on the screens of smart phones. To overcome this issue, we propose a proximity sensors based "no-touch" mechanism for smart phones by applying proximity sensors to initiate mobile applications without the need of touching the screen. We will discuss how to implement the proximity-sensors driven "no-touch" mechanism in Android platform and investigate its performance issues regarding detection accuracy and power consumption. Speech-oriented applications using the proposed "no-touch" mechanism on Android is also demonstrated in this paper.