WildKey: A Privacy-Aware Keyboard Toolkit for Data Collection In-The-Wild
This toolkit addresses the problem of collecting real-world text-entry data for researchers and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for data collection.
The paper tackles the challenge of deploying touch and text-entry data collection outside controlled laboratory settings by introducing WildKey, an Android keyboard toolkit that enables usable in-the-wild user studies while ensuring user privacy.
Touch data, and in particular text-entry data, has been mostly collected in the laboratory, under controlled conditions. While touch and text-entry data have consistently shown its potential for monitoring and detecting a variety of conditions and impairments, its deployment in-the-wild remains a challenge. In this paper, we present WildKey, an Android keyboard toolkit that allows for the usable deployment of in-the-wild user studies. WildKey is able to analyze text-entry behaviors through implicit and explicit text-entry data collection while ensuring user privacy. We detail each of the WildKey's components and features, all of the metrics collected, and discuss the steps taken to ensure user privacy and promote compliance.