A handwriting input method based on the thermal cue of the fingertip

•A handwriting input method based on the fingertip’s thermal cue is proposed.•A prototype device with its panel having a 16 × 8 sensor array is designed.•A detected algorithm for tracking the handwriting trajectory is presented.•The validity and the feasibility of the method are verified by experiments.

This paper proposed a handwriting input method based on the thermal cue of the fingertip. During writing or drawing movements of a fingertip on the surface of a temperature sensitive panel, the thermal exchange happened between the fingertip and the panel. In this method, the temperature values of the thermistor array in the temperature sensitive panel could be recorded and the fingertip moving trajectories could be tracked. Thus the handwriting characters written by the fingertip could be recognized. With this method, we then designed a handwriting prototype device with a 16 × 8 thermistor array in the row–column fashion covered its temperature sensitive panel. Finally, digital character input experiments on the handwriting device were performed. The experiment results verified the validity and the feasibility of the handwriting input method based on the thermal cue of the fingertip.