Abstract
The number of people who use computers for business and personal purposes increases as technology grows. The application of ergonomic practices on computer workstations reduces the musculoskeletal discomfort experienced and increases the overall satisfaction of the users. Keyboards are available in various systems, from computers to mobile devices, and have difference shapes and sizes. The keyboard size and shape is known to influence the user’s upper extremities. Alternative keyboard designs help diminish the pain in the arms that occurs due to awkward arm postures. Most previous studies tried to optimize the keyboard layout based on ergonomic typing and the frequency of letters’ co-occurrence. This research considers the frequency of the appearance of the most used 3,000 words in the English language. First, the frequency of each letter pair is calculated by the Text Analyzer. Then, a genetic algorithm is applied to design an ergonomically optimized keyboard to minimize the total distance of finger travel among the selected alphanumeric characters. The results showed that the distance travelled obtained by the proposed keyboard layout is less than that for the QWERTY keyboard in all different types of texts, in which an average of 6.04% improvement was achieved. Therefore, the proposed design can be used for keyboards to reduce time and fatigue.
Highlights
The use of computers has become a necessity for all purposes
The main aim of this paper is to develop a new keyboard layout for the keyboard arrangement problem (KAP) that is based on the frequency of letters and to create the optimal model for a physical keyboard
After solving the proposed genetic algorithm considering the above assumptions based on the 3000 words extracted from Longman Communication, a proposed keyboard layout is designed (Fig 7)
Summary
The keyboard represents one of the most popular and effective devices to insert, edit, delete and update long strings of information. Typing performance can be affected by the keyboard layout which helps to reduce musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Studies show that some factors such as travel distance, amount of pressure on the key, and the tactile feedback effect muscle fatigue and discomfort [1]. QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards are the two most utilized keyboards. Since the traditional QWERTY layout appeared on the typewriter in 1878, many efforts have been made to improve its inherent inefficiency. The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) has been very positively evaluated in terms of user performance and learnability; it can be very inefficient when typing in languages other than English, because it was designed using only the English corpus
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