Evaluation of Personalized Above-Neck Gestures for Accessible Mobile Gaming

Mobile gaming presents significant accessibility challenges for individuals with upper-limb impairments, as touchscreen interactions require precise finger movements and rapid reactions. While assistive technologies exist for general smartphone use, they are often incompatible with the time-constrained and simultaneous input requirements of video games. To address this issue, we investigate the use of fully personalizable, user-defined above-neck gestures (e.g., head movements or facial expressions) as a means to improve the accessibility of mobile video games for people with upper-limb impairments. Through a study with 12 participants, we explore the gestures that people with upper-limb impairments select during mobile gaming, and we assess performance and participants’ perceptions using three popular commercial video games as well as custom evaluation probes. Participants commonly selected symmetric gesture pairs (e.g., left/right profile, looking up/down) and preferred slower-paced games, which resulted in significantly lower workload compared to faster-paced games. Our findings show that above-neck gestures allow people with upper-limb impairments to play games that would otherwise be inaccessible to them, achieving performance comparable to external buttons in terms of accuracy, response time, and perceived workload.