Alternative communication systems for people with severe motor disabilities: a survey <s> Performance evaluation <s> Under contract to the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, we developed a system for prescribing augmentative communication devices for motor-impaired, nonvocal people. The system is novel in that it scores devices for their suitability for a client based on assessments that do not involve trial-and-error evaluation of client performance with devices. The “benchmarks” it calculates are designed to be predictive of the overall utility of a device given the client's needs, and of the communication rate the client will achieve with it once it has become completely familiar. The scoring process is performed by a program known as the Tufts-MIT Prescription Guide, which runs on IBM XT-compatible computers. Special-purpose assessment instrumentation has been developed to perform the motor-assessment tasks required by the Guide to estimate expert rate. An exhaustive questionnaire is used to get at the device features and functions that will be useful and preferable to a clien... <s> BIB001 </s> Alternative communication systems for people with severe motor disabilities: a survey <s> Performance evaluation <s> Computers offer valuable opportunities to people with physical disabilities. For example, a computer can allow someone with severe speech and motor-impairment to engage more fully with the world. This paper describes the design of a communication aid for motor-impaired users, who literally use computers as their communication partners. Currently, a low cost interface suitable for different types of motor-impaired users is hardly available. Additionally, the target audience of existing such systems is very much limited. The present work solved these problems by its adaptation mechanism. The adaptation mechanism provides an appropriate interface from an interface bank for each user before start of an interaction. The adaptation mechanism is continued during as well as after the end of interactions to make the system personalized to individual user. <s> BIB002 </s> Alternative communication systems for people with severe motor disabilities: a survey <s> Performance evaluation <s> People with disabilities can benefit greatly from services provided by computers and robots. Access to remote communications and information as well as to interpersonal communication and environmental control are assisted by current ubiquitous computers, wired and wireless networks and intelligent environments. Sensory, physical or/and cognitive restrictions to interacting with computers can be avoided by means of alternative interaction devices and procedures. Nevertheless, alternative methods are usually much slower than standard communications, frequently leading users with disabilities into unbalanced or unsafe situations. Therefore, the main challenge of human-machine interaction systems that have to be used by people with disabilities is to obtain the maximum communication and control with the minimum physical and cognitive effort from the user. This lecture overviews the main techniques used to optimize the control and communication flow, resulting in higher user satisfaction and security. <s> BIB003
As we saw above, a broad range of human-machine interfaces is available in the laboratories or in the trade making it possible to a person with disability to control a communication and environment control assistive device. An essential difficulty which arises then is the choice of the best interface for a given person. This problem is all the more complex here that the users concerned have physical and cognitive characteristics diverses. Thoughts on the evaluation of these characteristics to contribute to the choice of the assistive device were carried out of long standing BIB001 . However an evaluation of performance in this context cannot generally dissociate the sensor and the user. Thus we are brought to assess the human-machine system in particular by means of interaction models or of models of the user associated with a model of the task as in BIB002 . The objective in the particular case of assistive communication is to maximize the flow of information while minimizing the physical and mental workload of the user BIB003 . In what follows we shall review the methods reported in the literature aiming at measuring the performances of alternative communication systems by distinguishing two cases: use or not of human-machine interaction models.