Helping Children with Disabilities Access Tablets

Researchers at Georgia Tech are trying to open the world of tablets to children whose limited mobility makes it difficult for them to perform the common pinch and swipe gestures required to control the devices. Ayanna Howard, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and graduate student Hae Won Park have created Access4Kids, a wireless input device that uses a sensor system to translate physical movements into fine-motor gestures to control a tablet. The device, coupled with supporting open-source apps and software developed at Georgia Tech, allows children with fine motor impairments to access off-the-shelf apps such as Facebook and YouTube, as well as custom-made apps for therapy and science education.

Transcript

00:00:05 so what we use is um basically it's a it's a pressure sensor and what that means is that when you apply a force any force a light force a hard Force you get a signal that says I'm activated um and so we combine those signals and we convert them to what does a swipe look like so as an example if you have three sensors together and you activate them one 2 three that would be a swipe so you

00:00:29 see three quential it does a swipe if you have a button pressed you just say oh I have a signal positive one that means that that button has been pressed and it doesn't matter if it was pressed by a thumb a wrist a hand a head you still get that active signal um and so access for kids is a coupling of the hardware which is the sensors the microprocessor um with software which is

00:00:53 the signal processing the communication that then gets transmitted to a tablet that takes that data combines it together and decodes the language of the child