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Free Software Helps Disabled Use Mouse
An anonymous reader writes "A University of Washington team has developed a piece of free software to help those with motor control problems do what most of us take for granted every day: use a computer mouse to get stuff done. The Pointing Magnifier combines an area cursor with visual and motor magnification, reducing need for fine, precise pointing. The UW team is actively seeking user feedback."
I would have responded more quickly... but it took me about 3 minutes to track down the words I could copy and paste to form this.
If you lost both mouse and keyboard for 48 hours, I bet you'd beg to be given your mouse back. (even if you couldn't have your keyboard)
Give them a break. It's a start.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
This work is funded by Microsoft Research, Intel Research, and the National Science Foundation. If it leads to breakthroughs that are available to all individuals, no matter what computing platform they choose - great! But I've seen other public+private funded research end up owned and locked up by start-ups driven by the faculty doing the research. These end up benefiting the faculty member financially, they benefit the private companies who've invested, and they can be a windfall for the university - but the general public gets no benefit unless they buy into the commercial product. This bothers me, given that a good chunk of the work was done on the public dime (or, more accurately, on the public hundreds of thousands of dollars).
Research at publicly funded universities should be at least partially owned by the tax-paying public. It's not like these researchers are starving - full professors in engineering are making on the order of 20K a month, whether they're bringing in grants or not.
#DeleteChrome
Really intuitive too, I set my grandfather up with a unix command line and he was browsing the web with Lynx and authoring documents with Emacs in no time!
And here I was, thinking that Free software helps a disabled mouse that was used as a test animal.
-- Cheers!
Some of us with motor control problems can no longer use a keyboard. My fingers won't lift and separate enough to hit individual keys any more. I can still use a terminal, but it has to be in a GUI interface so I can use an on-screen keyboard.
Herp derp. Here is the project page. (It's 3 AM, what do you want from me.)
Right tool, right job, etc.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Calm down. There is no chance that this will be locked away. If you look at the project pages linked in the article, you can see that they have both been released under the New BSD licence. And at the bottom of the Angle Mouse project page, it states:
This work was supported in part by Microsoft Research, Intel Labs, and the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0811063 and IIS-0812590. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of any supporter.
So there you go, the project is still owned by the authors and not the companies that provided support.
The subject isn't very clear, but.. well, my point is that why are these things always presented in a manner that it is somehow the software being open-source which enables stuff like this? After all, there's lots of closed-source development going in the medical area too and they've just as well helped hundreds if not thousands of people. Basically, what does the license have to do with the fact that it enabled a disabled person to do something? To me it just sounds like trying to spin this as somehow a superior achievement from open-source, not accomplishable with closed-source, while diminishing the real point in all this: the disabled person.
there may be something that I missed about this one, but I'm sure that I have seen the same or similar years ago. Might be already patented, time will tell.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Extra buttons. For someone with motor control problems.
Grand idea.
A button is either in, or it's not. That sounds somewhat easier than precise positioning of a cursor.
My mouse has two buttons on the left-hand side. They work as forward and back buttons when browsing. If you made them into one button (No hardware alteration required) they would be very easy to press.
Lack of fine motor control isn't totally limited to the elderly and the disabled. As a healthy thirty year old, I had issues using a mouse with my wrist splint on last month. Something like this would have probably been perfect.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Onboard for a keyboard. Dasher to write this.