TabAccess, a Wireless Controller for Tablet Accessibility for Individuals with Limited Upper-Body Mobility

Over 3 million individuals in the US have a disability in their hands and/or forearms and thus have difficulties in effecting pinch and swipe gestures needed for tablet interaction. In this paper, a forearm mountable mobile interface, TabAccess (controller for Tablet Accessibility) is introduced. The objective is to provide an input interface for individuals with limited manipulation skills an alternative way to interact with touchscreen tablet applications. We believe that by combining TabAccess with mobile computers, effective education and entertainment opportunities could be delivered to persons lacking fine motor skills. For translation of gross motor gestures into touchscreen-based gestures, a methodology was developed to convert raw sensor data retrieved from the sensors into press and swipe gestures. The proposed device recognizes different gestures generated by a combination of sensors with hidden Markov models. This paper presents the design specifications of TabAccess, and discusses the training and testing results with three diverse applications a music player, a robot controller, and a communication app.