The Postural Comfort Zone for Reaching Gestures

We have proposed a method for objective assessment of postural comfort (Kölsch et al., 2003). We defined comfort as the range of postures that is voluntarily assumed despite the availability of other postures. Designing user interfaces within the limits of comfort zones can avert risks associated with unknown alternative use patters of the interface. Here we report on a user study that investigated the comfort zone for free-hand gestures in the horizontal plane at about stomach height. This space is of particular interest to novel technologies such as gesture recognition and virtual reality. The results are in line with previous studies on postural discomfort, but improve on resolution and are not based on subjective, questionnaire-based data acquisition. This study also serves as an example for how to design studies for comfort evaluation.