Eye-based typing system with social media for people with disabilities

Abstract

People with severe motor disabilities such as Motor Neuron Disease or Locked-in syndrome often have difficulty communicating with others. Their disabilities do not allow the use of complex peripherals which require a level of dexterity such as the standard keyboard and mouse setup for a computer and this hinders their ability to communicate with others, especially through social media over the internet, which can be a valuable tool for these people. The project aims to create an Eye Typing system integrated with a social media application for persons with severe motor disabilities in order to facilitate communication over the internet. The social media chosen is Twitter from Twitter Incorporated as its short 140 characters for its messages made it ideal as a platform to test the viability and speed of an eye-based typing system. In order to achieve optimal speed and accuracy of such a system, a gaze based dwell-free virtual on-screen keyboard is created with special attention given to the user interface to ensure accuracy of the gaze input. The user gazes sequentially at the letters on the keyboard and the raw input is processed in a word prediction algorithm. Data collection is done through a short experiment in which participants are to make use of the dwell-free keyboard to type generated phrases. A survey is then conducted to obtain the subjective opinions of the participants in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. The results have been satisfactory in proving the viability of an eye-based typing system for disabled persons, however more research is recommended in order to improve such a system.