HID accessibility device project for a friend with ALS

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:

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.

This is a really fine project, worth lots of support.
Not soo long ago a Brittish guy, Steven Hawkins, left us. He suffored from the same illness. Steven was more or less a modern "Einstein" until the end. He used really sofisticated electronical aids to communicate.
If You can get in contact with people in Stevens sfear I'm sure You can pick up valuble information.

How about the "air mouse" mounted on his head?

Take a look at atmakers.org. Arduino, CircuitPython, electronics, 3D printing, etc. applied to open source assistive technolgy. Check out their Facebook and Twitter feeds.

I also think the mpu6050 idea has most potential. But I would like to give some practical advice around prototyping , which I expect you will be doing a lot of.

Forget Leonardo. Big, clunky and bad compatibility with breadboards. The video you mentioned unwittingly illustrates the point. Get a Pro Micro. This will plug directly into a breadboard, making for a much more robust prototype. For connections between components on the breadboard, use solid core hook-up wire, cut to length and laid flat onto the breadboard. Much less likely to get snagged and pulled out during prototyping. See below for an example (here it's a Nano and a rotary encoder).

Another suggestion would be multiple mpu6050 attached to parts of the body with some movement. It might appear that only 2 can be attached, but with the use of the AD0 pins attached to different Pro Micro pins, you could have several more.