•  
  •  
 

Rehabilitation Practice and Science

Translated Title

利用Fitts定理評估頸髓損傷者滑鼠操作之功能性表現

Abstract

Due to the recent development of the assistive technology, patients with cervical cord injury may use an adapted computer input system to participate in various computer related activities, and as a result patients improve their quality of daily living and leisure activities. Fitts' Law is a reliable reference to compare the performance of normal persons using an input device like a mouse. The purpose of this study is to apply Fitts' Law to understanding the functional performance of patients with cervical cord injury when operating a mouse, trackball, and sip-and-puff controller.Twenty-five subjects were included in this study. The controls consisted of eight males and eight females without a cervical cord injury who averaged 26.9±2.4years old. Of the nine patients with a cervical cord injury, seven were males and two were females who averaged 28.0±6.6-years-old. The research methods consisted of two parts. First, the 16 control subjects used testing software of the computer input interfaces to establish baseline values for the mouse. Second, the nine patients were tested with the computer input interfaces. According to Fitts' Law, input tasks were designed by six difficulty levels of 1.15, 2.15, 2.74, 3.74, 4.32, and 5.32. When the cursor moved, the software recorded the movement time and the real-time orbit. Movement time was considered the experiment variable. The results of the study and control groups were analyzed separately. It was found that the movement time of all participants operating familiar computer input interface presented a linear prediction equation. At all levels of difficulty, the control group's performance using a regular mouse was superior to that of performance of cervical cord injured patients using three different computer input interfaces. The study group shows that with an Index of Difficulty 1.15 and 2.15, moving duration of the regular mouse was shorter than that of the trackball. However, when the Index of Difficulty was greater than 2.72, the movement time of the trackball was less than that of mouse. At all levels of difficulty, the movement times of the sip-and-puff controller were longer than that of the other two controllers. These findings support that the performance of patients with a cervical cord injury operating three different kinds of computer input interface is within an acceptable and practical range although their reaction speeds are slower than that of the control group. Nevertheless, patients with cervical cord injuries could benefit from using adapted input system in daily life.

Language

Traditional Chinese

First Page

205

Last Page

211

Download

Share

COinS