Gyro-mouse for the disabled: 'Click' and 'position' control of the mouse cursor

This paper describes a 'gyro-mouse', which provides a new human-computer interface (HCI) for persons who are disabled in their upper extremities, for handling the mouse-click and mouse-move function. We adopted the artificial neural network to recognize a quick-nodding pattern of the disabled person as the gyro-mouse click. The performance of our gyro-mouse was evaluated by three indices that include 'click recognition rate', 'error in cursor position control', and 'click rate per minute' on a target box appearing at random positions. Although it turned out that the average error in cursor positioning control was 1.4-1.5 times larger than that of optical mouse control, and the average click rate per minute was 40% of the optical mouse, the overall click recognition rate was 93%. Moreover, the click rate per minute increased from 35.2% to 44% with repetitive trials. Hence, our suggested gyro-mouse system can be used to provide a new user interface tool especially for those persons who do not have full use of their upper extremities.