Optimization of Switch Keyboards
This work addresses the challenge of improving typing efficiency for individuals with motor impairments, representing an incremental advancement in assistive technology optimization.
The paper tackled the problem of designing switch keyboards for patients with motor control difficulties by formulating it as a mixed integer programming problem, resulting in a new algorithm that is approximately 3600 times faster than previous methods and avoids non-optimal solutions.
Patients with motor control difficulties often "type" on a computer using a switch keyboard to guide a scanning cursor to text elements. We show how to optimize some parts of the design of switch keyboards by casting the design problem as mixed integer programming. A new algorithm to find an optimized design solution is approximately 3600 times faster than a previous algorithm, which was also susceptible to finding a non-optimal solution. The optimization requires a model of the probability of an entry error, and we show how to build such a model from experimental data. Example optimized keyboards are demonstrated.