Thanks for the clue - it did help me get further.
However, i'm not sure if relying on spin-arrows will be good because there are multiple closely located spinners on the page and hence I thought, I will use "document.activeElement" to check if the focus is still on the spinners::
http://jsfiddle.net/2hy9jz2h/The problem with this approach is that the save doesn't get called if the focus is out of the document!
Any further hints will be of great help. Thanks.