We are looking forward to the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. This year, the conference will be in Barcelona, Spain. We are happy to contribute our recent work on smartwatch interaction as a late breaking work: MultiBand. The poster will be presented by David Petersen and Marvin Reuter. The work resulted from a prototype built by Marvin for his bachelor thesis.
MultiBand: Adding Multi-Touch to the Smartwatch Wristband for Extended Interaction
The small screen size of smartwatches presents input challenges due to the limited touch surface and screen occlusion. To expand the input space and mitigate the fat finger problem, extensive research has explored various strategies for improving smartwatch interaction design. While wristband-based input has also been studied, there is a lack of research on multi-touch interaction and gestures performed directly on the band. To address this gap, we present MultiBand, a functional prototype that expands smartwatch input capabilities by leveraging capacitive touch sensors around the wristband. Our prototype enables users to execute different functions on a smartwatch based on how they place their fingers on the wristband. Our implementation distinguishes between two types of finger interactions to trigger different scrolling techniques when navigating a contact list. We contribute the software and hardware of our prototype as well as first insights from preliminary user tests.
 | : MultiBand: Adding Multi-Touch to the Smartwatch Wristband for Extended Interaction. In: Adjunct Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2026. |
We also have a repo on GitHub with some material for building the prototype.