3dScan: An Environment Control System Supporting Persons With Severe Motor Impairments

Torsten Felzer and Stephan Rinderknecht

Eleventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - Posters and Demos (ASSETS 2009)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 26-28, 2009

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Summary

This proposal is about a poster dealing with a scanning-based software system, which aims at giving persons with severe motor impairments a means to interact with their immediate environment by issuing tiny contractions of an arbitrary muscle. The implementation makes use of an extension of row-column scanning, called *three-dimensional scanning*, which reduces the time required to select a certain item by eliminating the need to scan long rows or columns. A simple experiment comparing the resulting text entry capabilities to conventional row-column scanning shows that the entry rate can be increased by over 30%.

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