Wireless Text Entry and Mouse System for the Handicapped

Text entry system can be found commonly in modern computer and mobile devices such as smartphone and tablet. However, most of these systems are not easily operable by the handicapped; the system either has small area size of each key or requires major hand movement, such as in the case of the common "QWERTY" keyboard that contains over a hundred keys. All of these present systems are less than ideal for the handicapped to use as input device. In this paper, a new wireless text entry system is proposed to help the handicapped people to input text efficiently with minimum hand movement. From the design of the prototype, it is smaller than the traditional keyboard, portable, lightweight, user friendly, and long operating hours with built-in mouse function. Practically, it is tested and proven that only one hand is needed to hold the equipment and one finger to interact as well as to input the text. The algorithm used is: Press-Drag-Release algorithm, namely the user just need to presses on the infrared board, followed by finger dragging around the board for letter selection, and lastly, releasing of finger for input the letter. From the result of experiments, the proposed system was tested and proven portable (7.5cm × 5.5cm × 5.5cm), lightweight (100 grams excluding battery), user-friendly with many built-in functions (Esc, Copy, Cut, Paste, Ctrl-A, and Mouse), and long operating hours (29.4 hours operating time with 10,000 mAH battery). For Words Per Minute (WPM), the experiment shows that it can achieve as high as 5 to 10 WPM depends on the skillfulness of the user.