Ergonomic Design of an Optimal Hindi Keyboard for Convenient Use

In this paper, we present a new design of the Hindi keyboard for convenient typing. We describe the ergonomic criterion we have used to evaluate and compare keyboards. This criterion is a mathematical formulation of keyboard optimality in terms of the distribution of the typing effort among the ten fingers, accessibility of commonly used keys and various other factors. Measured against this criterion, our keyboard performs more than twice as well as the standard Hindi keyboard. We also describe a genetic algorithm based optimization framework which we use to arrive at our new keyboard design. Finally, we perform some sensitivity analysis on our optimization procedure and demonstrate that our results conform to intuitive expectations.