By applying conductive materials in a specific pattern on the pen’s shaft, we can detect when it is laid on a capacitive touchscreen. This enables on-pen interactions, such as button clicks or swiping, and whole-shaft interactions, such as rotating and dragging the stylus. We validate a device’s capability to detect these six interactions with all but two interactions achieving a success rate above 95%.

I conducted an assessment of each PenShaft interaction. My objectives were to validate the performance of our proposed PenShaft implementation and the system’s ability to detect our interactions. I also evaluated the usability of the PenShaft interactions when performed by users and gather feedback about the interactions and PenShaft use in general.

I performed both quantitative and qualitative studies. I recruited 6 participants from within our organization. Participants completed the six tasks in a fixed order. After completing each task, participants completed a survey to gather subjective data. All tasks but two had an overall error rate of less than 5%.