Alphabetically Tuned and Optimized Mobile Interface Keyboard

ATOMIK (Alphabetically Tuned and Optimized Mobile Interface Keyboard) is a highly optimized method, using touch keyboards, for entering data into handheld devices. It potentially allows typing of faster than 40 words per minute. ATOMIK uses the graffiti area of a PalmOS device as a touchscreen keyboard. The layout of this keyboard is specifically optimized for touchscreen applications. ATOMIK has three major features:

Higher movement efficiency than any other existing touch keyboard.

Alphabetically-tuned layout: Generally, letters from A to Z run from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the keyboard. This layout helps novice users find letters that are not yet memorized.

Letter connectivity of common words: Many common words or comment fragments of words, such as “the” and “ing” are totally connected.

The highest movement efficiency was achieved by a Metropolis optimization algorithm in which the keyboard was treated as a “molecule” and each key as an “atom.” The “atomic” interactions among all of the keys drove the movement efficiency — defined by the summation of all Fitts’s law movement times between every pair of keys, weighted by the statistical frequency of the corresponding pair of letters in English — toward the minimum.