A Bangla Predictive Keyboard For People With Neuro-Motor Disorders

Presented By

Animesh Mukherjee

Research Scholar

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

IIT Kharagpur

The Reality

• Suppose you are asked to use a computer which has

The Mouse Unplugged

The Keyboard Unplugged

The Divide

• Nevertheless there is a big population in India (14.56 million approx) that experiences such a difficulty every day

• These are people suffering from neuro-motor disorders

• For them the presence or the absence of a mouse or a keyboard is always synonymous to its absence

Neuro-Motor Disorder – What is it ?

• These disorders are caused by -

Faulty development of motor areas in the brain, or,

Total damage of these motor areas.

Produces Nerve Cells that Causes Movements of the

Body PartsServes to Modify the Movements

Consequences …

• Severe difficulty with fine motor tasks (like writing, stitching, using computer peripherals, and various other such tasks.)

• Severe difficulty with any kind of communication.

• In a nutshell,

Access to the computers is almost a “dream come true”

The presence/absence of the peripherals are irrelevant for them.

Can Computers Help

• Certainly computers can help this population by being

An easy medium of communication (which they find very difficult)

An intelligent companion by understanding the needs and thereby reducing the communication efforts

The Impetus: Something Indian!!

• Mainly the Indian scenario

Present systems are tuned to foreign socio-cultural context

All of them are imported – no local support

Costly for an average Indian user ( E Z Keys - $1400, Gyro-HeadMouse - $1495, CameraMouseTM - $695 + costly video camera)

Lack of Adaptation in existing systems

The Prelims: Special Access Mechanisms

• Hardware Component – Depending upon the degree of their motor control the disabled people can use either one or at most two switches (specially designed for them) in order to access the computer.

The Switch Emulating theShift Operation

The Switch Emulating theRegister Operation

The Interface with the Computer

Courtesy IICP, Kolkata

Special Access Mechanisms (contd…)

• Software Component

Scanning Mechanisms – Guided / periodic focusing and defocusing of screen elements.

Shift of focus – Shift operation (needs one switch)

Selection of a particular screen element – Register operation (needs another switch)

Methods of Scanning

Co-ordinate Scan Matrix Scan (3D, 2D, 1D)

Cartesian Polar

Direction of movementof the mouse pointer

Direction of rotation ofthe axes

Direction of movement of themouse pointer

Direction of movementof the x-coordinate

selector

Row Level Scan

Cell Level Scan

Block Level Scan

NumericKeys

VowelKeys

ConsonantKeys

MatraKeys

ConjugateKeys

Text Area

CommandMenu

Prediction Panel This panel is the

contribution of thecurrent work. It doesboth character and

word levelpredictions.

The red rectangleis the highlighterindicating row-

level scan

This row doesprediction from adynamic corpuswhich tries tocapture userpreferences

These rows doprediction from a

static corpus

Probable words tobe typed next

SulekhA: A Demo

Statistics

• SulekhA uses

Bigram Prediction Strategy for Word Level

The training corpus at present contains approximately 1 million words and 0.12 million distinct bi-grams.

The format of the corpus is shown below,

<frequency bigram1 bigram2>

Unigram Prediction Strategy for Character Level

The training corpus at present contains approximately 1.3 million words and 0.05 million distinct unigrams.

The format of the corpus is shown below,

<frequency unigram>

The StrategiesWord Level

Character Level

Shradha Writes with SulekhA

Typing rate (number of characters typed per minute) was measured

Measurements were taken when the prediction was not in use and also when in use

Assessments: SulekhA

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

D1 D3 D5 D7

Sessions

Typi

ng R

ate

of B

arsh

a

Rate of Increasein Typing Speedfor Barsha inAbsence ofPrediction

Rate of Increasein Typing Speedfor Barsha inPresence ofPrediction 0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

D1 D3 D5 D7

Sessions

Typi

ng R

ate

of S

radd

ha

Rate of Increasein Typing Speedfor Sraddha inAbsence ofPrediction

Rate of Increasein Typing Speedfor Sraddha inPresence ofPrediction

Typing Rate of Barsha Typing Rate of Shradha

Usability5 – Excellent, 4 – Good, 3 – Average, 2 – Difficult, 1 – Very Difficult

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

D1 D3 D5 D7

Sessions

Use

r G

rad

esUsability Curvefor Barsha

Usability Curvefor Sraddha

Usability Curvefor Subhajit

Usability Curvefor Chandan

References

• [1] Hufschmidt-Schneider M., Kuhme Thomas and Malinowski U.,• Adaptive User Interfaces, Principles and Practice.• [2] Ahmed Seffah and Homa Javahery, Multiple User Interfaces,• Cross-Platform Applications and Context-Aware Interfaces.• [3] http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/aui.html• [4] http://www.words-plus.com• [5] http://www.advancedperipheral.com• [6] http://www.logitech.com• [7] http://cameramouse.com• [8] http://www.cirque.com• [9] http://orin.com/index.htm• [10] http://www.quadjoy.com• [11] http://www.censusindia.net/disability/disability_mapgallery.html • [12] http://www.webhealthcentre.com/general/cp_india.asp • [13] Kaul Sudha and Warrick A., Their Manner of Speaking, Indian• Institute of Cerebral Palsy, Kolkata, India, 1997.

Questions