Gesture Wand for Mobile Devices

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The primary goal of this project is to develop a gesture wand that will be especially useful to older individuals to overcome problems associated with the decreasing size of the user interface in mobile devices. This wi ll be targeted exclusively to individuals who may have their vision or manual dexterity compromised. Due to advances in technology, mobile devices will become increasingly smaller. As the size of these devices decreases, their user interfaces will also shr ink in size. This presents a special problem for older adults, who experience age and disease related decrements in vision and manual dexterity. These losses can cause significant problems when attempting to interface with small mobile devices. Given the a ging demographic of the population and the increasing availability of compact technologies, the number of older adults using small mobile devices will continue to increase. Our solution to the interface problem is an interface using movement of a wand in f ree space that has audio confirmation and feedback. A gesture wand prototype will be quickly developed using 3-D accelerometer MEMS chip and a single chip wireless connection (i.e. Bluetooth) with microcontroller. The gesture wand quick prototype will be u sed to determine the best gestures for use in a mobile device virtual interface for older age individuals. The specific gestures will be numbers and control commands. The gestures will be recognized using a Hidden Markov Model to break the gestures down i nto sequential symbols. The microcontroller on the wand will be programmed for preprocessing and feature extraction. The mobile device will compare the incoming data using the Hidden Markov Model of possible gestures. Using the gesture wand hardware and so ftware developed, we will test the proof of concept with at a least 36 individuals age 60 and older who have their vision or manual dexterity skills compromised or both. After a short training session, they will be asked to use the gesture wand to enter nu mbers and specific control commands. Success of this aim will be if 90 % of the people can reliably operate the prototype gesture wand 90 % of the time in spite of vision or manipulative skill problems. The primary goal of this project is to develop a gest ure wand that will be especially useful to older individuals to overcome problems associated with the decreasing size of the user interface in mobile devices. This will be targeted exclusively to individuals who may have their vision or manual dexterity co mpromised.