Estimation of Cursor Movement Characteristics of Operating Pointing Devices for People with Physical Disabilities

Abstract

The purpose of this work was to characterize the pointing device operations by examining the ease of cursor control in order to improve assistive technology for users with physical disabilities. Experimental work consisted of using participants without disabilities who performed tasks that involved moving the cursor to specified locations on the PC screen in specific directions. It is assumed that the difficulties encountered by the participants controlling the pointing devices would be the same as those encountered by a user with physical disabilities. The experiments were performed using two types of manual operation; the index finger and the thumb, on three sizes of trackballs. Participants rated the ease of operation and speed of cursor control for specific directions for each device. The results identified the vertical and diagonal directions to be difficult cursor movement operations for all experimental conditions. The speed dependence for diagonal and vertical directions varied for all participants. The trajectories of cursor movement in diagonal directions were found to have different characteristics. Therefore to achieve full cursor control and optimize the operational performance of the pointing devices, the direction and speed of cursor movement needs to be independently controlled to meet the individual needs of the user.