title: Controlling mouse pointer position using an infrared head-operated joystick.
abstract: This paper describes the motivation for and the design considerations of a low-cost head-operated joystick. The paper briefly summarizes the requirements of head-operated mouse pointer control for people with disabilities before discussing a set of technological approaches that can be used to satisfy these requirements. The paper focuses on the design of a head-operated joystick that uses infrared light emitting diodes (LED's) and photodetectors to determine head position, which is subsequently converted into signals that emulate a Microsoft mouse. There are two significant findings. The first is that, while nonideal device characteristics might appear to make the joystick difficult to use, users naturally compensate for nonlinearities, in a transparent manner, because of visual feedback of mouse pointer position. The second finding, from relatively informal, independent trials, indicates that disabled users prefer a head-operated device that has the characteristics of a joystick (a relative pointing device) to those of a mouse (an absolute pointing device).
authors.affiliation: Department of Computation, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UK.
authors.forename: D G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Drew
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Blenkhorn
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D003143:Communication Devices for People with Disabilities / Q000191:economics; D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D006233:Persons with Disabilities / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D004867:Equipment Design; D006804:Ergonomics; D005246:Feedback; D019416:Head Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation; D012986:Software Validation; D014584:User-Computer Interface