Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis to use computers

For a short time in DC (District of Columbia, USA) government, I worked with Age-Friendly DC. They were all about universal design, obviously. I learned a ton - like how curb cuts are good for folks using canes, walkers, and wheelchairs, and those who push things like strollers. However, the Age-Friendly DC staff could have done much more to work with non-aged policy advocates and organizations, to show them the benefits of things like curb cuts.

Personally, I'm using a lot of what I learned from the Age-Friendly folks; my 83yo mom has moved in and the learning curve, while steep, got a head start with my government experience.

As someone who's not a quadriplegic, I want one of these.

I would think fewer moving parts is less complex. Considering it’s basically a trackpad, I doubt the hardware and software are bleeding edge.

This is exactly correct (I worked in AAC and BCI for years, and still collaborate with the group that I used to work closely with). To elaborate a little bit on your excelelnt answer: In addition to being enormously expensive and requiring heavy customization and personalization, assistive technology has other issues that go well beyond the core technical functionality. It also often requires significant up-front investment in configuration and training for the user, which needs to be done by a professional in the field, and then --- crucially --- also requires ongoing maintenance and re-training by skilled practitioners, which means there are ongoing operational expenses.

One of the reasons for this last bit is that many users of assistive technologies have very dynamic situations. For example, if they have a progressive condition like ALS, their mobility and other capabilities and needs will change over time; even if the user doesn't have a progressive condition, their living situation very likely will change over time, which may involve needing to re-work their setup. This might involve something as major as moving from one care facility to another, or having to adjust to the presence of a new pump or something that causes EM interference with your device.

Even for somebody with a very static medical condition and very stable living situation, their computing setup won't be static, so will need ongoing maintenance; or, alternatively, their computing setup will become static if they end up dependent on a particular piece of assistive technology, which can lead to a whole other set of issues (which is how you get people running ancient versions of Windows for years and years and years, because it's what their eye-tracker works on, and the vendor is long out of business and so never got it working on Windows 10).

The other piece to the puzzle is that, speaking as a gross generalization, users of assistive technologies tend not to be wealthy people (many speech and motor disabilities make it challenging to work). So, you've got an expensive product, often involving ongoing operational costs, with zero economy of scale, for a small and relatively poor customer base; this all adds up to what may fairly be described as "a very challenging business". Adding another layer of complexity, the economics of commercial assistive tech in the US have a lot to do with insurance Medicaid rules; the only reason there is any commercial activity at all in assistive technology and AAC is because under some circumstances Medicaid will pay for a device, within certain very rigid and complicated boundaries. So now your business also is going to have to juggle that problem in order to keep the lights on, which will add another layer of constraint to what is already a complicated situation.

On the other hand, when the right technology is paired with the right user and the right support, the impact on the quality of life for the user and their family can be truly enormous. Which is what keeps people working in the space...

that's so cool that you tried. how much did you spend on advertising for your Kickstarter? I totally would have kicked in if I'd heard about it.

Seems to be the case for so many assistive technologies. It is even more frustrating considering how high impact some of these technologies are.

Do you have any insights on how this space could grow other than State Funding or Insurance policy changes?

I did experiment with using a trackball taped to the floor. It's hard to get precise positioning moving your foot. I think using the tongue along the roof of your mouth would be more precise and less fatiguing. What was more useful was a set of 9 foot switches that could be programmed to send arbitrary keystrokes. I could off load from my hands the most common keypresses I do all day, for example: pageup, pagedown, tab, enter, backspace, mouse click, passwords... along with speech recognition software you can get at least non-coding tasks done without using your hands too much.

Best I personally managed was push-to-talk via a foot pedal, to help with mic discipline in cooperative games without reducing my reaction time.

I'm not sure my feet have the accuracy to work as a mouse.

I think assistive devices do better as a class when some fraction of them are also usable or even attractive to able people as well. It gets us thinking about other modes of interaction and of course it brings the unit price for those items down out of the stratosphere.

Foot mouse will unfortunately stay niche, but when I saw the device in this article, I thought, "Why not for everybody?"

FWIW, I've considered mapping a midi pedal board to meta keys and macros before. That alone could be useful - you'd go from a typist to something like an organist.

Lift your foot up and try to balance in your seat and see how it feels. Try using a standing desk with it. Put a pen between your toes and try to draw a square and feel major muscles in your upper thighs struggling to make these fine control motions. Put on high heels and try to do anything that isn't gross movement. Sit in a train/plane/car and think of trying to use a laptop with a foot controller. Heck, put your mouse on the ground right now, turn pointer speed down as slow as possible to accommodate the gross movements of your legs, and try to use it.

While snowboarding or skiing, it is difficult to control music playback because bulky gloves are being worn. Cycling might be another sport where you want to control music without taking your hands off the handlebars. A single button (like tapping an earbud) that could be gently bit down on could control song playback. Prior art for this type of device would be something like this: https://www.airturn.com/products/airturn-bite-switch-remote-...

Some people have much stronger and more nimble tongues than others due to physical differences (e.g., tongue size, the length of the tongue frenulum, etc.). But this is the case for the hands as well, which is why people have different input preferences and different gameplay preferences.

Personally, I think I would prefer a mouth controller over a traditional controller. I am very prone to tendinitis in my hands, plus I have small hands and short fingers, and can't play twitchy games well because of it.

Maybe. I just think of all the other things that my eyes want to be doing. I figure that would interfere too much in the usefulness. But i agree. We should just test out all the wacky ideas and see what works best.

Also consider perforations in the inert parts of the MouthPad. Especially considering its intended users, it's a choking hazard and sooner or later somebody will get one of these stuck in their throat. You'd rather it not kill them when that happens.

This definitely left a sour taste in my mouth.

It's fine. I'm not where the money and news coverage is. Go help those quadriplegics.