Interface for Operating a Personal Computer with Head Tilting and Mouth Open/Close Motions
Nobuaki NAKAZAWA, Masahiro SHIMIZU, Kou Yamada, Toshikazu Matsui, Isao Itoh · TRANSACTIONS OF THE JAPAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS Series C · 2006
This paper describes the support-equipment of operating a personal computer for users who have an obstacle on the regions of upper limb. The user wore a head set device with an angle sensor on the top of the head and a distance sensor in front of the mouth. Two-axis angle sensor could measure the roll and pitch angles of the head, and distance sensor was used to judge whether the mouth was opened or not. The mouse cursor operation was composed of cursor movement mode and click operation mode. Human operator could confirm the input mode by the indicator located near the CRT monitor. In the cursor movement mode, a mouse cursor could be moved according to the direction and magnitude of the tilted head angle. Opening the mouth for more than two seconds could start the click operation mode, and then click functions such as double click or drag actions were selected by the directions of head tilting. Moreover, the mouth open/close motions could support the mouse cursor positioning operation. In test operations, it was confirmed that the mouth operation decreased the number of head tilting times so that the physical burden of the operator could be lightened.