

Figuring out keystroke-input modification for a newly disabled family member - survivd

A young family member just came out of a 2 month-long coma after being blindsided by a geriatric driver.  She has significant brain damage, which has introduced a huge "shake" into the movements of the one arm/hand she can control.  She's not expected to get better in that regard.<p>She keeps trying to use keyboards &#38; tablets, but due to her limited motor control, she cannot effectively type, which seriously frustrates her.  Basically, she hits the key she wants too many times, along with a "constellation" of the keys around the target.<p>I'm wondering if there is a programmatic solution to this that would allow her to type.<p>My conceptualization of the problem is that the program would need to buffer all of the keystrokes coming in, and "screen" them by assuming for a character to actually be accepted as input, it must be his a certain number of times (i.e. and adjustable threshold).  Basically, imagine that if, while brain-damaged, you want to type  "hi", you're going to hit the constellation of keys around the "h" key N times, but fewer than the number of times you successfully land on the "h" itself.  Repeat with "i".  The output looks something like "ughhjyhyhhhhh" and "uiuioiiioi".<p>I feel like you could try and measure a user's individual keystrike accuracy through a few trials of typing something like our above "hi", which would then adjust thresholds appropriately, allowing other programs to ignore the mistakenly pressed keys.  You could give the user a sort of customized "landing pad" where they need to hit their choice key somewhere between, say, 4-7 times before it actually registers, which would screen out all of the others key that get accidentally pressed in the attempt.<p>Once a character gets accepted as intentionally struck, clear buffer and continue.<p>This leads to my questions:<p>1) Is this possible?<p>2) How difficult would it be to implement on a laptop or tablet (no OS preference).<p>3) Does this seem like the best way to go about solving this problem (user cannot accurately strike keys), or am I overcomplicating it?<p>Thank you.<p>Additional disclosures: I'm a weak programmer (basic python, basic java), and have never written anything that didn't stand by itself (i.e. no OS interfaces, hooking, etc).  I'm way out of my depth -- I just want to help give her back some quality of life.  Also, she can't speak right now, so voice recognition is out.
======
aw3c2
I forgot the name or term but there is that "characters appearing on the right
of the screen and the user navigates a pointer through them to form words"
thing which if I recall correctly was meant as easier input method for
disabled people.

