Innovation — In all directions!

Applied Human Factors (AHF) continues the focus on the relationship of human beings to technologies with an exciting new concept that was just released called OneWay.

In some respects, this product evokes memory of the old Etch-A-Sketch drawing pads so many of us used as kids, which involved a drawing tablet system in which you could move dials to draw constrained, perfectly controlled contiguous vertical or horizontal lines. To produce complex drawings was difficult, involving movement of both hands to approximate curves. The metaphor is useful both in how the Etch-A-Sketch helps guide movements, as OneWay does, and to how it illustrates the complexity of the computer screens we all engage.

Schroeder indicates that moving into “A mouse pointer kind of world,” while a step forward for the majority of us, introduced a level of difficulty for physically challenged computer users with limited ranges of motion and dexterity. However, if a user is able to move an input device, usually a mouse or joystick, competently in one dimension, either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, OneWay offers a tremendous new method for using that ability while adding precise support for movement across the screen. In the scenario below, Jim imagines a user with good right and left hand motion who uses only left/right movements to point-and-click on a target on a two-dimensional computer display:

OneWay is a mouse emulator that offers a new alternative to the various computer input interfaces currently available. I’ll try to draw you a sketch verbally. You can think of this new approach as sort of ‘divide and conquer’ in which we take the computer display and let the user concentrate on one dimension at a time. We start with a transparent vertical line drawn in the middle. I can establish a location using a switch or I can use a dwell switch and just have it dwell there. After I’ve established a horizontal location, my same left to right movements will now allow movement of the pointer up and down that line. We let the user continue doing what they can do fairly well (see diagram explanation).

With OneWay, the user first moves a vertical bar left and right and clicks to show the horizontal location of the target, then moves the mouse cursor up or down to show the vertical location of the target, then moves left and right within a button bar (not shown) to select click, double-click, drag, or cancel. The whole time, the user has only physically moved the mouse left and right.

Thus, the technology allows a user with a single range of competent movement to select options, toggling, or translating, that movement into any movement along X or Y coordinates on the screen. Further, the software can automatically wrap the pointer around to the other side of the screen when necessary to get to a target.

AHF plans to incorporate this one-dimensional approach into its onscreen keyboard, the Reach Interface Author, its Smart Lists REACH add-on, and its Smart Speech program which will be released this summer. Part of the REACH expansion will include options for linear keyboards, in which letters are arranged in a single row or column (as shown in the picture below).

	In this screen shot, a user moves in one dimension (e.g., left and right) to move the mouse cursor up and down the keys on this one-dimensional vertical keyboard to select the first letter (“h”) in a word being typed (e.g., “hurrying”).
	After the “h” is selected, Smart Lists opens a vertical list offering the letters that follow an initial “h” based on the words in the currently open dictionary(ies).

Although clearly not as fast as a non-disabled mouse user with full mobility and precision, Jim explains that this is a major step forward as an alternative to available options:

Switch scanning can be a very tedious, boring, time consuming sort of world. In some of our products we’ve improved that world. Especially with Smart Keys and Smart Lists, we’ve already shown that we can cut the number of clicks that they have to make by more than half, and increase their speed tremendously. Hopefully, OneWay will provide an alternative for someone who might currently be scanning or using a pointer in two dimensions — but not very accurately.

The company is also ‘playing around with variations,’ (pending patents) in which a more sophisticated method might be used to screen out perturbations in movement, as Jim elaborates,

Let’s say you have a situation where you can move from right to left with a fairly good precision, but there’s some spasticity with the involved muscle groups. We’re thinking there might be situations where we can capture a physiological response, like EMG (Electromyography — the electrical activity of muscles) in the involved muscle groups. What we’re suggesting is that there might be a way of going to the underlying electrical responses and having that operate the location on the screen directly.

Independent Living and Employment Supports

Since the late 1980’s, through various venues, Jim has been working on ways to help persons with disabilities live independently and obtain and retain employment. In 1994, funded by NSF, one of the first AHF projects was intended for education and used two-way radios to allow a student to verbally “converse” with a remote computer. Thinking this might be useful for providing memory assistance, several proposals were submitted but none was funded — possibly the walkie talkie approach was not ’slick’ enough to garner interest from grantors. With the availability of the Internet and cellular phones, that has changed, and CyberCoach is on its way. The Department of Education provided initial funding, and the National Institutes of Health currently is funding further development and testing of the approach:

We are making this ‘low end’ on the user’s side, all they need is a cell phone or land-line phone. We are putting all the intelligence and sophistication on our end, what we call ‘the hub’. We will have a lot of info stored on each subject. Users can call in and get that information, or they get calls that remind them of tasks and the order in which to do things. We track them. If a user is in a work situation and ‘loses track’, we are trying to provide opportunities for them to call in, report it, and get help. Or we can record the message, call up the supervisor, and play it back.

Jim is aware that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recently funded several similar projects based on hand-held devices and which have been shown to be effective, and he aims to focus more on the coordinating, social integration of all involved persons with its central systems than the end user device. These overarching systems are being designed to be compatible with various devices being produced to provide the structured task input that other developers are creating. He elaborates,

If you look at the literature, you’ll find the social element is a very important thing. We’re trying to enhance communication among the person, the rehabilitation professional or whoever is ‘in charge’ of this person, family, employer, and friends. This includes what we call the ‘angel’ — a caretaker who lives with them or near them who is willing to look in on the person. It’s all automated and computer-based, and a partnership between Microsoft and Intel allows us to carry on automated “conversations” with as many people as we have phone lines connected to our computers. You get a new economy of scale. We can set up contingencies in the system, like if you don’t get a response in three calls to the user, call the angel and leave a specific message, using customized communication “scripts.” Or send text messages or emails to users who cannot hear. We also can send picture messages if the user has a picture phone.

Jim is presently focused largely on traumatically-brain injured persons since there is national interest in this problem and corresponding funding available, but sees this technological service going broader:

We think it’s a potentially useful tool in general. For example, in medicine, the traditional medical model is, ‘You come to my office, I’ll fix you… you go away and come back “x” time later and we’ll see how you are doing…’ This is an alternative approach that automatically tracks people with different conditions to see how things are working — to monitor them with a tremendous increase in communication. We’d like to test it on the aging population: the elderly are familiar with and accept telephone technology.

Research and Business Models for Assistive Technology

As with his original profile interview, Jim emphasizes user testing — a rigorous process now being applied to CyberCoach — as the heart of development and the only business model he can claim for AHF, adding,

It’s just really important. Human factors and ergonomics in general is an area that emphasizes user testing, and that’s where we are — especially early in the design of any product or service. Users are the people who are able to give you the best suggestions on what should be fixed or changed. That’s always been our philosophy and it seems to be working. Also, in the funding and research communities, to get funded, you have to have to include testing your proposals to (hopefully) demonstrate that what you’re building does what you say it’s doing.

Still, he hasn’t seen this evidence-based emphasis trickle down to schools, where most of his sales are. Districts still are not, in his experience, calling for the data that his company could provide, apparently seeing a good match between product and need.

His best advice for new assistive technology developers flows out of the same business ‘model’:

It’s worth noting for other people coming into this field that it’s important to listen. Listen to the users, and listen to the people who work with the users — keeping communication open with speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and special education teachers is critical. A lot of our best product features have come from phone calls and particular situations they’ve encountered — sometimes they have a solution, and sometimes just knowing about the problem makes a solution pretty apparent to us. They do us a real service!

His final comments are also for assistive technology newcomers as he describes a field he admires even though, or perhaps especially because, it serves a comparatively small niche of needs and users:

This is a small group of manufacturers that serves, thank goodness, a small population who need it. It is kind of like a community. Yeah, there’s competition, there always will be, but there’s also this kind of collegial atmosphere that I’ve always been impressed with. You don’t get that in a lot of industries.