SGER: Collaborating with Children with Severe Disabilities in the Design of Eye-Controlled Software

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For people who have severe physical disabilities but retain control of their eyes, eye tracking may provide not merely a means to afford augmentative communication, but also a powerful and noninvasive opportunity for creative expression. Yet there have been few if any attempts to involve people with severe motor impairments as partners in participatory design projects to develop eye-controlled software to support creative expression, and the design space for eye-control of computers remains largely unexplored, so that most current eye-controlled software is limited to the user moving the mouse cursor with the eyes and looking at buttons to click on them. The PI believes other control and feedback techniques are needed to support a range of creative activities. The situation is arguably most acute with respect to young children who, because of severe physical impairments, are locked out of activities that are critical for creative, social, and emotional development, yet relatively little work has been done to explore and evaluate eye-controlled software for children with disabilities. In this project, the PI will explore how participatory design techniques can be extended to children who communicate primarily through their eye movements. He will seek ways to incorporate these children into the design process as users, testers, informants, and design partners, and will identify aspects of the process that can be reused for other applications and other user groups with severe disabilities. The PI will develop, deploy, and evaluate eye-controlled software systems that enable children with severe motor impairments to participate in creative activities that are currently not accessible to them. The project will specifically focus on the childhood activity of music making. The PI will confirm that the creative opportunities are successfully provided through quantitative and qualitative analyses. Broader Impacts: This interdisciplinary research will enrich the scientific underpinnings and invent new techniques for creative expression and computer-control with the eyes, with special emphasis on the needs of children with severe motor impairments, for whom the project will identify new accessibility opportunities and provide creative expression through participation in collaborative, team based design projects. This project will ultimately provide people of all ages with severe motor impairments with a means of engaging in artistic, educational, and communication pursuits that are currently out of reach.