Revolutionizing communication for folks with extreme motor impairments

Key findings from consumer research

Along with simulation experiments, we performed consumer research to check the effectiveness of SpeakFaster. The research concerned each non-AAC and ALS eye-gaze customers, as a result of collaborating in such research can tax the already-limited time and vitality of people with ALS that talk with eye-gaze alone. The 19 non-AAC contributors, typing on a cellular gadget by hand, gave us useful details about the benefit of use of the system and allowed us to quantitatively validate beneficial properties in keystroke charges, supporting our outcomes from two people with ALS who completely use eye-gaze typing to speak.

The research itself has two phases, a scripted and an unscripted part. Within the scripted part the contributors play the position of one of many folks in a two-person dialog, the place the content material that the participant must kind reveals up on display as textual content. Within the unscripted part the participant engages in 5- or 6-turn brief dialogues with the experimenter the place simply the dialog opener is predetermined, e.g., “What sort of music do you hearken to?” and the remaining is spontaneous. Previous to the research, contributors watched a video demo and bought a small follow session of 5 conversations to familiarize themselves with the interface.

To evaluate the SpeakFaster interface, we measured motor motion financial savings (keystrokes saved in comparison with the total set of characters to be typed), practicality (typing velocity in phrases per minute), and learnability of the SpeakFaster UI (how a lot follow it takes for folks to get snug utilizing the system).

Throughout all research, SpeakFaster demonstrated substantial keystroke financial savings in comparison with conventional baselines for each eye-gaze customers and non-AAC contributors with each scripted and unscripted dialogs. For non-AAC customers, SpeakFaster permits for 56% (p = 8.0×10-11) keystrokes financial savings within the scripted state of affairs and 45% (p = 5.5×10−7) financial savings price within the unscripted state of affairs. SpeakFaster additionally enabled vital keystroke financial savings within the scripted part for our ALS eye-gaze tester.