Stroke victim sends email through homemade Kinect interface

Blogger Chad Ruble has created an innovative, gesture-powered interface for his aphasia-suffering mother, using Microsoft’s Kinect accessory to help her send simple emails. Writing in a blog post, Ruble explains how his mother, Lindy, has experienced difficulties reading and writing since suffering a stroke twelve years ago — wanting to help her bridge the “keyboard gap” which prevents many disabled people from interacting with computers, he created a system based on emoticons, allowing her to select both an emotion and a level of intensity, represented by signal strength bars.

When a message is sent, it is translated into text, with most of the information being transmitted through the subject line: “Lindy feels very happy.” The system builds on a previous effort, dubbed Iconicate, which used the prototyping platform Arduino to provide a physical interface — according to his post, Ruble plans to expand the app in future, offering a wider variety of messages while refining it to avoid the occasional mistakes that Lindy still makes.