Entries Tagged Motor impaired

People with severely impaired movement often use one or two switches to control their computers and/or communication devices. Even though the switch is arguably the simplest electrical component, when it becomes an assistive technology it is likely to cost the end user hundred’s of dollars. On the other hand, a fantastically complex electronic device, the USB camera, is available at discount stores for a few dollars. CamKeys is a simple python program that makes a cheap camera emulate any number of switches. It simply generates key events when user-specified regions of the camera image change.

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Daniel’s alternative pencil project has hit the email lists and has a nice review over at All Together We Can Do Our Best. I’m excited to see how user’s respond to his hard work.

Flexible keyboards like this, this and this are super cheap and readily available. I wonder if we could use them to make an alternative keyboard for people with physical, visual, or cognitive disabilities?

I’m thinking we could turn the keyboard over (keys down) and glue it to a thin board. I’m guessing the back of these things is pretty smooth. You’d put your tactile or visual overlay over the back of the keyboard. Now when the user presses, multiple keys will likely be activated. But we can handle that with a special keyboard layout as described here for Windows. I’m pretty sure there are comparable capabilities for Macs and Linux.

We could even define some sort of simple overlay maker that makes it simple to define and use specialized layouts. I’m guessing we could only support relatively large regions with this simple cheap approach.

Here’s an idea for a simple game to encourage movement to music. I’m drawing from our Comp 80 class ideas for Generalized DDR.

In this game the player moves to music. Their score depends on how well their movement is synchronized with the music and on how many different moves they made. A more advanced version allows them to play along with the music though various delays will have to be overcome to enable their sounds to be sync’ed with the music. The system keeps track of their score and rewards improvement. Perhaps new tunes get unlocked like in DDR.

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An interesting story over at ScienceDaily about an RPI student’s camera-based head-tracker music system. This will be very popular if they make it freely available.

Detects vowel sounds in audio input to control the cursor. Nice use of commodity technology. I hope they make the software available for free.

Firefox is the only browser I use, so when things don’t work, I get worried. We’re looking at Flash as a delivery vehicle for some of our applications for people with disabilities and ran into two potential show stoppers:

1. Flash doesn’t get focus unless you click on it with the mouse; many of our potential users don’t use mice!
2. Flash doesn’t allow access to right click; many switch interfaces generate left and right click events to signal the user pressing the mover or chooser switch.

I surfed around a bit expecting to find some quick solution and only found despair. It seems that lots of people have encountered these problems in various forms and haven’t found a solution.

I’ve found a very simple approach that works just fine for what we need; perhaps it will help someone else. The high bit is I’m using the Flash ExternalInterface object to allow JavaScript to catch keyboard and mouse events and then tell Flash about them. Flash never gets the focus and doesn’t need it.

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Gretchen pointed out these videos at AssitiveWare, very interesting.