All,
An old and dear friend of mine — let's call him “Fred” — is a programmer who suffers from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS is a degenerative neurological pathology where the patient slowly loses the ability to move his muscles. In other words, all the interface niceties we take for granted, such as trackpads, mice, keyboards, and so on, are now useless for Fred. Consequently, he’s been exploiting the various “accessibility” features that are native in Windows 10, such as speech-to-text and voice command, to compensate for the fact he can no longer type or move a mouse to reposition a mouse cursor.
Despite his condition, Fred remains as sharp as ever, and he and I are focusing on enabling Fred, with what little movement he has left, to reposition a mouse cursor and replicate a left and right mouse click. After an exhaustive search for available commercial products, we found two accessibility HID devices, such as the “Eye Gaze Edge” and the “Head Mouse” system, but the nature of Fred’s bed-ridden position makes these alternatives impractical. We figured we’d turn our attention to building our own solution with the Arduino platform.
The only movement Fred has left are his feet (left-right, less so up and down), neck, and head.
Here is where I come in. I am now Fred’s hands to put together whatever we can find as practical solutions. More optimistically, we hope that whatever our research finds may be useful for others with similar accessibility issues. I am a web development and system administrator manager, not an electrical engineer. However, I have spent the past month performing extensive self-learning over on LinkedIn Learning with excellent course material. Barron Stone has provided me with the fundamentals of EE, and Zahraa Khalil's curriculum have been focused on Arduino projects.
If you’ve read this far in, you have my deep appreciation. Now to get to the Arduino project part of this post.
With the help from Amazon’s Alexa assistive technology, Fred spends his days researching Arduino projects that might be helpful. Some examples that have crossed our path are:
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AIR MOUSE | GESTURE MOUSE using GY-521 MPU6050 Accelerometer and gyroscope Module with Leonardo
AIR MOUSE | GESTURE MOUSE using GY-521 MPU6050 Accelerometer and gyroscope Module with Leonardo - YouTube
This was easy to assemble. I had an Arduino Leonardo and the GY-521 accelerometer. However, the “air mouse” presumes a level of hand movement Fred lacks but such a gesture or movement-based system has promise. - The Myoware Muscle Sensor kit looks interesting, but I’m unclear how to take an EMG signal that converts into anything other than the mouse click – left or right function.
MyoWare 2.0 Muscle Sensor Development Kit - KIT-21269 - SparkFun Electronics - The common ultrasonic distance sensor seems to offer some hope for mouse movement, although this youtube video demo shows jittery cursor control, and latency, reflects my concerns about using an ultrasonic sensor in this way.
Arduino uno atmega328 ultrasonic sensor mouse-SRF04 - YouTube
Despite our extensive research, I’m certain there’s much we’ve missed. I’d love your thoughts, feedback, advice, and references to accessibility-related groups that I can tap into to help us help Fred move a mouse cursor.
Again, thank you for your time and attention to my post.