Evaluation of a Head-Tracking Pointing Device for Users with Motor Disabilities

Abstract

People with disabilities generally do not have the same access to health care, education and employment opportunities. It is known that, very often, they do not receive the support they need, and end up experiencing the taste of exclusion to perform their daily activities. Analyzing the overall rates of people with disabilities, it is possible to perceive that social inclusion of minorities is not a simple task. One of these daily activities is the use of information technology. Considering the cost of commercial Assistive Technology devices are very expensive for developing countries like Brazil, we proposed a comparative evaluation between the low-cost wearable head-based device and the performance values obtained in Kurauchi et al. [8] work, to analyses the viability of this low-cost device. This Experimental results indicate that IOM presented a better accuracy than the two other devices, providing accurate mouse pointer positioning. Even though the speed of the low-cost IOM device was very similar than the devices analyzed and compared, the most significant result was the low-cost device accuracy was 100%, error rate was 0%.