Wow, I'm having a minor flashback watching your TED talk. I worked (and lived) at a company in Syracuse in 1999-2001 called the Center for Really Neat Research doing pretty much exactly what you did. Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL5qGFeVIXM
The hardware side of the system was an analog to digital converter box and super cheap sensors. Switches, pressure sensors, photocells, potentiometer, accelerometers, etc, most hand made from basic electronic components, for next to nothing. We worked with people with severe physical and/or mental disabilities and allowed them to connect to the computer. We did also work with commercial sensors too. I remember one guy we used a commercial eye tracker, but it was pretty expensive. On the software side, we had a visual programming environment called NeatTools that would easily allow anyone to take the inputs from the sensors and do any task on the computer. So even people with very poor or crude motor skills could use this successfully. Like you we did this free of charge for our clients.
The software is free and open source, although it's quite out of date, I think it was written for windows 95? http://www.neattools.org/ It was designed to work with the input box, but it isn't required.
I miss the work. It was very rewarding and super fun. It sounds like you're doing some amazing stuff. Keep it up.
crnr2 karma
Wow, I'm having a minor flashback watching your TED talk. I worked (and lived) at a company in Syracuse in 1999-2001 called the Center for Really Neat Research doing pretty much exactly what you did. Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL5qGFeVIXM
The hardware side of the system was an analog to digital converter box and super cheap sensors. Switches, pressure sensors, photocells, potentiometer, accelerometers, etc, most hand made from basic electronic components, for next to nothing. We worked with people with severe physical and/or mental disabilities and allowed them to connect to the computer. We did also work with commercial sensors too. I remember one guy we used a commercial eye tracker, but it was pretty expensive. On the software side, we had a visual programming environment called NeatTools that would easily allow anyone to take the inputs from the sensors and do any task on the computer. So even people with very poor or crude motor skills could use this successfully. Like you we did this free of charge for our clients.
The software is free and open source, although it's quite out of date, I think it was written for windows 95? http://www.neattools.org/ It was designed to work with the input box, but it isn't required.
I miss the work. It was very rewarding and super fun. It sounds like you're doing some amazing stuff. Keep it up.
View HistoryShare Link