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If you're interested, the field that studies these sorts of technologies is called Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), and it is a very active area of research with a lot of great stuff going on. My department does a lot of work in this area; drop me an email if you're interested and I can point you in the direction of some reading. You are 100% correct that current AAC solutions are often suboptimal, but one of the big challenges facing the field is that individual capabilities (both in terms of cognitive function and motor control) vary extremely widely from user to user, and so there's no such thing as a "one-size fits all" solution. Oh, and head buttons like the one you saw typically use "over-sized arcade buttons" because the user doesn't have the fine motor control needed to operate anything smaller. The idea is to give them as big and easy a target to hit as possible. There are users who, literally, are limited to twitching one of their eyebrows as their sole voluntary muscle motion, and sometimes even that is unreliable (i.e., it only twitches some of the time, or for a short period of time). In such a case, you want the button to be as easy as possible to trigger- think Fitt's law. :-) Accelerometer-based solutions such as the one described in the article have the potential to be extremely useful; however, in the case of a user who's limited to a head button (or an elbow button, a nose switch, etc. etc.), the physical movements involved could well be too variable and irregular to be usefully decoded. That said, one of the active areas of research within the AAC world is how to build machine learning algorithms into AAC software such that an individual's system adapts over time to their patterns of use, so depending on what's going on with a particular user it might be possible to train something up... but, of course, doing this in any kind of repeatable way often ends up to be a crapshoot, as, again, users vary incredibly widely in terms of which muscles they can control and the extent to which they can do so. |