Welfare Support-equipment for Operations of Personal Computer with Head Tilting and Mouth Open-Close Motions

This paper describes the support-equipment of operating a personal computer for users who have an obstacle on the regions of upper limb. The user wore a head set device with an angle sensor on the top of head and a distance sensor in front of the mouth. Angle sensor could measure the roll and pitch angles of the head, and distance sensor could judge whether mouth was opened or not. In mouse operations, a mouse cursor on a CRT monitor could be moved according to the direction and magnitude of the tilted head angle. The click operation mode could be started by opening the mouth for two seconds, and then click functions such as double click or drag were selected by the directions of head tilting. Human operator could confirm the input state by the indicator located near the CRT monitor. In test operation, it could be found that the speed-up ratio of a mouse cursor with respect to the head tilted angle influenced on the operationality and that the mouth operation was available to lighten the physical burden of the operator.