Researchers have created a SmartWatch application that can detect what you have typed from the movements of your left hand.
Yes something like keylogger that is. The app follows the micro-movements of your SmartWatch and is able to detect the keys you press with your left hand and thus guess the words you type on the keyboard.
Mr. Romit Roy Choudhury, Associate Professor in ECE at Illinois, along with a group of students, who worked on the project they named Motion Leaks, or MoLe from the initials, will present their results this week at congress MobiCon 2015 to be held in Paris.
Their research was funded by the National Science Foundation (National Science Foundation).
The application they developed will be installed on SmartWatch on Samsung Gear Live.
Using the built-in sensors movements, and more specifically the accelerometer and gyroscope of the SmartWatch, the researchers were able to create a 3D map of the user's hand movements while typing on a keyboard.
The researchers then created two algorithms, one to locate the pressed keys, and one to guess which word was typed.
The research team reports that their implementation still has a long way to go, as there are some shortcomings. Mole currently cannot detect special characters (numbers, punctuation and symbols), the spacebar still creates some problems.
The application developed for Project Mole works only on Samsung Gear devices, but the researchers report that, in theory, a similar application could be developed for all SmartWatch models.
