A Video-Based User Interface for People with Disabilities of the Fingers

Design of a video-based user interface using image processing for people with disabilities of the fingers, such as rheumatism and osteoarthritis, is implemented in this paper. This user interface is simply composed of a CCD camera and a PC, and allows users to manipulate the PC using small movements of single finger. The finger is appropriately detected in the images from the CCD camera using image processing techniques. Control boxes for pointing and character input functions are also made. To verify the usability of the interface, some tasks such as clicking, dragging, maze, and character input tasks are experimentally performed by a healthy subject. It is clear from the experimental results that he could smoothly perform clicking and dragging actions, and that he could directly input sentences in Microsoft Word without any difficulty.