Fitts' Law for Angular Foot Movement in the Foot Tapping Task

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to confirm difference between angular foot movement time and existing foot Fitts' law predicting times, and to develop the angular foot Fitts' law in the foot tapping task. Background: Existing studies of foot Fitts' law focused on horizontal movement to predict the movement time. However, when driving a car, humans move their foot from the accelerator to the brake with a fixed heel. Therefore, we examined the experiment to measure angular foot movement time in reciprocal foot tapping task and compared to conventional foot Fitts' law predicting time. And, we developed the angular foot Fitts' law. Method: In this study, we compared the angular foot movement time in foot tapping task and the predicted time of four conventional linear foot Fitts' law models - Drury's foot Fitts' law, Drury's ballistic,Hoffmann's ballistic, Hoffmann's visually-controlled. 11 subjects participated in this experiment to get a movement time and three target degrees of 20, 40, and 60 were used. And, conventional models were calculated for the prediction time. To analyze the movement time, linear and arc distance between targets were used for variables of model. Finally, the angular foot Fitts' law was developed from experimental data. Results: The average movement times for each experiment were 412.2ms, 474.9ms, and 526.6ms for the 89mm, 172mm, and 253mm linear distance conditions. The results also showed significant differences in performance time between different angle level. However, all of conventional linear foot Fitts'laws ranged 135.6ms to 401.2ms. On the other hand, the angular foot Fitts' law predicted the angular movement time well. Conclusion: Conventional linear foot Fitts' laws were underestimated and have a limitation to predict the foot movement time in the real task related angular foot movement. Application: This study is useful when considering the human behavior of angular foot movement such as driving or foot input device.