Gender differences in gesture-based interaction: user studies and perception of Information Technology

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the gender differences in basic hand gestures for the design of user-centric and adaptive systems. Our goal is to target personalization of gesture-based interaction, devices and applications, using this feedback. First, we focus on gender differences in the perception of technology as well as the externalization of thoughts using natural hand gestures. We commence with an overview of what type of gestures are used and how they are defined in a gesture recognition system. In the empirical studies, we use both video analysis and surveys as the methodologies. We conducted a survey regarding the perception of Information Technology (IT) with 20 male and 20 female participants. Second, we focus on gender differences in gestures. We conducted an experiment involving 10 male and 10 female Australian adults whose age range between 25 to 30. In the experiment, they describe an object using hand gestures and speech. We analysed the results of both survey and experiments. In this paper, we point out the gender differences in the perception of IT, as well as gesture types, frequency and occurrences. Drawing conclusions from these comparisons, we discuss the potential effects of gender differences in the design of multimodal interfaces.