On-screen keyboard controlled by gaze for Vietnamese people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Abstract

BACKGROUND: On-screen keyboard controlled by gaze is the most useful approach to help people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) communicate. However, the design of the traditional on-screen keyboard hinders gaze typing for languages other than English. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this paper is developing a specialized on-screen keyboard controlled by gaze for Vietnamese people with ALS. METHODS: Designed on-screen keyboard layouts and selection mechanism based on the requirements of eye typing and Vietnamese language characteristics from the statistics results on the Vietnamese Wikipedia Corpus dataset. During the experiment, we also absorbed and modified some design features according to the users’ suggestions. RESULTS: The authors proposed two new specialized on-screen keyboard layouts controlled by eye gaze for the Vietnamese language which both speed up typing and reduce typos. The results of the experiment are an average typing speed of respectively 23.1 and 26.1 characters per minute, and an average error rate of 1.0% and 0.5% for the two layouts. All participants were satisfied when using the system at their house. CONCLUSIONS: Although the effectiveness of the proposed method depends on the time of use and the familiarity of users with the new keyboard, the potential of the proposed method is great.