On Electronic Tools Supporting People with Disabilities

Abstract: There is a group of people that have special communication needs, because of some disabilities. Problems in interactions with others cause deficits in social experiences and thus influence quality of life and have devastating effect on their personalities. Therefore it seems reasonable to try to amend such situations with a support of technologies involving computers. Unfortunately, the computers interfaces are usually handled with the help of keyboards, mice and display monitors and some people are not able to access such usual equipment. However, contemporary hardware and software may help impaired or handicapped people communicate, live and work more or less normally, because there are several ways of analyzing their intentions that are expressed, e.g., by brain activity, eye movement, head movement, facial gestures, touch, speech, use of feet, use of breath and mouth. In this article, we discuss human-computer interface systems, consisting of a device analyzing physical signals coming from the sources described above and a graphical or non-graphical user interface that could be operated by the disabled persons. We also describe in some details a new electronic platform, called C-Eye, that not only makes possible a communication with a person using it, but also allows an integration of some medical measurements and computer techniques based on man - computer interaction.