HoDi: New scientific paper published

Another important scientific milestone has been reached in the HoDi research project. Together with TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, we have published the paper “Hands on the Bars: A Multimodal Gesture Elicitation Study for Motorcycle Handlebars Comparing Visual, Tactile, and Conceptual Consensus”.

The study focuses on the question of which gestures are suitable for safe and intuitive interaction directly on a motorcycle handlebar grip, without requiring riders to take their hand off the bars. As part of the HoDi project, a systematic gesture study was conducted with 20 participants.

One distinctive feature of the study is its multimodal approach: the gestures performed by the participants were captured both through video recordings and the hand movements derived from them, as well as through the capacitive sensor technology developed within the project and integrated into the motorcycle grip.

This made it possible to compare different forms of consensus: Which gesture do users consider conceptually appropriate? How similarly do they actually perform it? And how clearly can the interaction be detected by the sensor system?

The results show that the specific motor execution of a gesture plays a particularly important role in the development of intuitive interaction concepts. Based on the study, an initial empirically validated gesture set for future human-machine interfaces on motorcycle handlebars was derived.

HoDi therefore not only provides new insights into the design of future motorcycle HMIs, but also establishes a scientific basis for the further development of our hands-on detection and gesture recognition technology directly within the grip.

The paper was written by Marvin Reuter, David Petersen and Prof. Dr Matthias Böhmer from TH Köln, together with Kevin Krüger and Moritz Schmidt from Brehmer, and will be presented at the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’26) in Vaasa, Finland.

Another encouraging step towards a motorcycle grip that not only detects whether a rider’s hand is on the handlebar – but increasingly understands what they intend to do with it.

The project team, from left to right: Moritz Schmidt, Kevin Krüger, David Petersen, Matthias Böhmer, Marvin Reuter and Joel Neumann. (Photo: Olaf-Wull Nickel/TH Köln)