Computer mice and piano for the disabled

Alexandra Is a Good Fellow, Polit.roo

For the past few years, engineers from Japan and South Korea have presented inventions and concepts every year designed to improve the standard of living of people with disabilities and severe limb injuries.

In December, the staff of the scientific center of Japan, University of Tsukuba (University of Tsukuba) developed a unique system that allows you to play keyboard musical instruments without touching them with your fingers. This invention is intended exclusively for the disabled, so a healthy person is unlikely to be interested, however, as a concept it is priceless.

In order to play, for example, on such a piano, you just need to wear special glasses with built-in sensors that track the slightest movements of the eye muscles. The musician sees in front of him a row of keys that denote not notes, but whole consonances, chords. To make them sound, it's enough just to look at them. Of course, only relatively simple compositions can be played this way, so for now this "visual" method has obvious limitations.

The development is aimed primarily at the disabled and bedridden patients who have not lost the desire to study music. Moreover, in the near future they will be able to play any musical instruments – the specialists of the University of Tsukuba intend to present similar systems that will allow them to play guitar, drums and harp without using their hands.

A few months earlier, the South Korean giant company Samsung Electronics also took care of people with disabilities and introduced a system called Eyecan+. Samsung has been engaged in this development since 2011, gradually lowering its cost. Eyecan+ is a computer mouse, to use all the functions of which the movements of human hands are also not needed – all actions are performed similarly, tracing the movements of the eyes. With this device, you can scroll through images, search for information on the Internet and even type large volumes of texts. This mouse is capable of executing eighteen different commands.

The device is also a pair of glasses with sensors, similar to the first concept, and is quite cheap ($45).

Samsung is going to donate several hundred copies of Eyecan+ to hospitals and nursing homes in the new year as part of its charity event. In addition, the company will not commercialize the project, and promises to soon share the features of the technology with investors, which will open up new opportunities for the implementation of this unique technology worldwide.

However, inventors from another Japanese university, Kinki University, went the furthest in their desire to help disabled people: they have created a wireless computer mouse that can be controlled by breathing. The device is a special sensory sponge that measures the duration and strength of inhalations and exhalations. The user can move the cursor up and down in this way and "click" on the mouse buttons.

It is worth saying that inventors in a series of their concepts do not single out people with disabilities exclusively with hand injuries. For example, South Korean engineer Jaepyun Lee in 2012, on the International Day of the Disabled (December 3), took care of hearing-impaired people by demonstrating his system called Communicaid (Deaf Communication System).

Communicaid consists of three components: special glasses that visually alert a deaf person about external sounds, a visual-sound module and a mobile communicator that simplifies the communication of a person with hearing disabilities with ordinary people. Lee is currently working on improving all three modules of the system in his office in San Francisco.

Also, since November 2014, several crowdfunding sites have been raising funds to create software for smartphones based on the Nexus 5, in which there will be no buttons, no touchscreen, no styluses. They will execute the owner's commands either completely in voice mode, or thanks to the user's head turns. At the same time, all services and even online games promise to remain as accessible as for classic smartphones. The gadget promises to be inexpensive, its interface is intuitive even for a child.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 24.12.2014