A Head Mouse Alternative Solution Proposal for People with Motor Impairments: Design and Usability Assessment Study

Abstract

Accessibility is important to include people with disabilities in public life. People with disabilities experience problems in their lives due to products which aren’t designed for them. Addressing these problems is the responsibility of all humanity and the search for solutions should increase. Improving disabled persons’ lives is only possible by applying some rules to product design, such as, improving use-case scenarios. Software solutions must be considered as products in this case. Developing special software programs and upgrading existing solutions to improve the user experience for disabled persons is the obligation of all software developers. Even though the mouse is one of the most important tools, required to access webpages and many other software programs, using it can be a huge problem for people with disabilities, such as, paralysis patients. Therefore, throughout history, different types of methods have been presented as solution. Most of them are not suitable, due to various reasons, like, economic feasibility, mechanic stability and bad designs. In this work, a new method, with more in-built modern and simple technologies, is presented as an alternative to others. To outclass the good economic advantage of its competitors, a limit was set on a low budget webcam and low-tier computer specifications. The Camera tracks the user’s head movements and reacts according to it, using as measurement some metrics about the physiology of human body. Machine learning is used to extract face features and learn the user’s face to determine mouse movements. Machine learning was kept as simple as possible, in order to cope with the low system specification limitations. The main topic of the work is the design and development experience. The solution was tested with a small group of participants and their feedbacks were taken to plan for future improvements. In generally, the users’ comments were good, although some features, such as sensitivity, should be improved. The result of this work will be used to improve the software solution and hopefully will touch the life of people with disabilities.