SBIR Phase I: Adapting Touchscreen Devices for Motion-Disabled Users

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes not only assistive technology for the severely motion-disabled, who currently find it impossible to use a touchscreen, but also many who are not officially diagnosed with a motion disability. Initial sales to this wealthier, typically elderly, US audience will pay $50, helping to fund company growth. Phase I experiments will add new scientific insights in HCI. Phase I will yield a low-cost accessory that, in large-scale production, will ultimately have a ~$10 price that is similar to the existing market for styli and texting gloves, which are of limited benefit to the motion-disabled, and more cost effective than accessories such as electronic pens. This low-cost, single-chip accessory can be scaled up in manufacturing efforts to enfranchise hundreds of millions of motion-disabled individuals worldwide. The proposed device will be operating-system and device independent, and will require lower development costs than competing hardware such as electric pens. If the proposed technology were to be commercialized successfully at a reasonable price, millions in the US (and many times that worldwide) marginalized by the touchscreen revolution will be able to fully participate in the innovations these devices bring to society. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project has the potential to improve Human Computer Interaction (HCI) for (~34 million US) motion-disabled users who struggle with capacitive touchscreens. These screens assume users' fingers act as intermittently connected capacitors. The motion-disabled are unable perform such gestures. Software-only adaptations and the well-established accessories (styli or texting gloves) do not help the motion-disabled. This project combines an inexpensive hardware accessory, a custom chip and an extra-software-layer running on the touchscreen operating system (OS). Many motion-disabled are low-income individuals who require low-cost, single-chip accessories?yet such chips have too much parasitic capacitance. This project is designed to 1) demonstrate the feasibility of fabricating touchscreen accessories that reliably encode low-bandwidth information from the motion-disabled into the signals received by a capacitance touchscreen; 2) develop extra-software-layer applications that interface such accessories for motion disabilities in human-subject evaluation; and 3) design a chip for such accessories that overcomes cost and parasitic-capacitance problems. Feedback from human-subject and electronic measurements allow simultaneously optimization of three interrelated issues: hardware reliability, accessory form-factor, and the extra-software-layer functionality. Results will include subjective and objective human-subject evaluations, accessory form factor, low-parasitic-capacitance integrated-circuit design, code, and OS/application interfacing techniques for such accessories.