Experimental Measurement of Information Transfer Rate of the Inertial Sensor Based Human-Computer Interface for the Disabled

The paper presents inertial sensor based human-computer interface for the disabled. The device uses commercially available inertial sensor pack to reliably measure 3D head orientation (via Kalman filtering of accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer measurements) which is then transformed into appropriate control signal(s) depending on the intended application scenario. In order to measure information transfer rate (or throughput) of the device, application to computer pointer control is explored. Initial study on the subject was achieved in our earlier work [1] where number of application issues were identified. The current paper deals with possible solutions to some of the issues by introducing additional signal conditioning algorithms and examines their influence on device comfort and throughput as the two most important performance parameters. Obtained information transfer rates are presented and compared to values from the initial study and to values of some widely used interfaces such as trackball or joystick (found in the literature). The effects of proposed improvements are discussed and conclusions are drawn. Key-Words: human-computer interface, throughput, inertial sensors, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer