TYPING BY SIGHT
No need for keyboard or mouse as the eyes have it
Computer users who have lost the use of their hands now have a greater chance to interact with PCs - through their eye movements.
Thanks to a new development from a group of students at the Prince of Songkla University, a new program called Typing of Mind allows people to type using their eyes. One of the developers, Wongsakorn Chantrapornsyl, a 22-year-old student from the Department of Computer Engineering at the university, said the program was aimed at allowing disabled people to more easily use a computer through eye movements. Wunsit Sirirut, a 22-year-old student from the same university and a co-developer, said the Typing of Mind program came with two main features - a controller and a typing feature. The controller comes with a motion detection program and a digital Web camera. When a user moves their eye to capture a character or word, the eye's movement is detected and the information sent to the program to process and determine the output. The typing feature is based on Objected Oriented Programming to enable programs to detect and differentiate the eye movement. He said the system allowed users to "type" by moving their eye to choose characters from right to left. The system will record and type the characters in the middle. Users then choose another character to type again until they complete the word they want. The system will show information that they type on the display screen. Meanwhile, when users want to delete characters and words, they just focus their eye on the character or word, then move the eye from the centre to the left. The system also allows users to insert and delete characters between words so that users do not type new words or sentences inadvertently. The program enables users to type characters in both Thai and English. The developers said they plan plug-ins for Typing of Mind for word prediction and dictionaries, so that users can more easily type the word they want into the computer. "The program will be very useful for people who have lost an arm or those who do not use a keyboard and mouse to type characters and information into the computer," said Wongsakorn. Moreover, the program also allows users to access the Internet through their eye movement. Wunsit said that as a future development the team planned to develop Typing of the Mind to support Pocket PC and Palm devices, so users can take it anywhere they want.
jirapan@nationgroup.com Jirapan Boonnoon The Nation
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