Nail+: Sensing Fingernail Deformation to Detect Finger Force Touch Interactions on Rigid Surfaces

Force sensing has been widely used for bringing the touch from binary to multiple states, creating new abilities on surface interactions. However, prior proposed force sensing techniques mainly focus on enabling force-applied gestures on certain devices. This paper presents Nail+, a technique using fingernail deformation to enable force touch sensing interactions on everyday rigid surfaces. Our prototype, 3×3 0.2mm strain sensor array mounted on a fingernail, was implemented and conducted with a 12-participant study for evaluating the feasibility of this sensing approach. Result showed that the accuracy for sensing normal and force-applied tapping and swiping can achieve 84.67% on average. We finally proposed two example applications using Nail+ prototype for controlling the interfaces of head-mounted display (HMD) devices and remote screens.