An Interactive System for People Suffering from Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

In this paper the authors present the development of an augmentative system for people with movement disabilities (mostly cerebral palsy people) to communicate with people that surround them, through a human-computer interaction mechanism. The authors developed an assistive technology application based on gaze tracking in order to select symbols in communication boards, which represent words or ideas so that they could easily create phrases for the patient's daily needs. Cerebral palsy people already use this kind of communication boards, so the authors intend to extend their use for people with absolute no motor coordination. An important improvement of the proposed system with respect to the existing solutions is the ability to work in the presence of voluntary or involuntary head movements. An evaluation of the usability was performed, which showed that it can be easily used by any non-trained person.