Patent attributes
A method for designing a keyboard for efficient data entry. A user inputs data from a predefined set of characters such as letters or symbols on an input device by pressing one or more keys, in a sequential fashion, for each character. Based on the frequency of occurrence for each character, a prefix-free coding is used to generate an optimal or near-optimal key sequence mapping for the given character set. In one exemplary embodiment, eight to twelve keys from a phone keypad are used to generate English alphabets, which substantially reduces the average number of keystrokes per character. The present invention enables the user to efficiently input typical data from a given probability distribution of characters using a limited number of keys.
