Friend: A Communication Aid for Persons With Disabilities

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.