SIGACCESS

Nowadays, electronic devices are used across the several scenarios that compound our day. Mobile devices, with their reduced dimensions but capacities increasingly similar to desktop computers, have drastically augmented our communicative capabilities offering total availability, everywhere and to everywhere. These devices have become essential for human-human communication but also gather an application set that make them, more than simple phones, high productivity and leisure tools.

However, tetraplegic persons face great difficulties or total inability to voluntarily interact with these devices. In this document, we present an approach to allow interaction between tetraplegic users and mobile devices. This interaction is based on myographic information (Electromyography) collected from residually controlled body areas and on the redesign of the dialogues between the system and the device. Through user studies, we designed interaction schemes that allow adaptability to the several lesion degrees but also to the several scenarios that make the users’ daily life. We undertook user studies that validate Electromyography as an interaction mechanism as well as the capacity to adapt to the several possible scenarios, offering real mobile devices accessibility.