Abstract
This study was carried out in order to elucidate the operational efficiency of pointing devices (hereinafter, PDs) for personal computers including a mouse, track ball, touch pad, and joystick (hereinafter, 4 types of PDs) that may be operated by children with spastic diplegia. Regarding the method, 35 children with spastic diplegia used 4 types of PDs, and with the input of hiragana as the subject for measurement, the number of correct and incorrect character inputs was analyzed. As a result, though the validity of the number of accurate character inputs according to the 4 types of PDs with the examiner was high, verification by an interclass correlation coefficient was not applicable to the number of incorrect character inputs. No significant difference was observed as a result of investigating the exact number of character inputs between the mouse and the trackball from multiple comparisons using the Steel-Dwass method (P>0.05). That is to say, regarding the 6 test items for Erhardt developmental prehension assessment, it was believed that in children with spastic diplegia in which the developmental age of the upper extremities exhibits an ability of 8 months or more, the same degree of efficiency was exhibited in the operation of the mouse and the trackball according to the index for the exact number of character inputs, thus suggesting it has high practicability.
