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Pointassist for older adults: analyzing sub-movement characteristics to aid in pointing tasks
Conference proceeding

Pointassist for older adults: analyzing sub-movement characteristics to aid in pointing tasks

Juan Hourcade, Christopher Nguyen, Keith Perry and Natalie Denburg
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on human factors in computing systems, Vol.2, pp.1115-1124
CHI '10
04/10/2010
DOI: 10.1145/1753326.1753494

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Abstract

Perceptual, cognitive and motor deficits cause many older adults to have difficulty conducting pointing tasks on computers. Many strategies have been discussed in the HCI community to aid older adults and others in pointing tasks. We present a different approach in PointAssist, software that aids in pointing tasks by analyzing the characteristics of sub-movements, detecting when users have difficulty pointing, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the cursor in those cases. PointAssist is designed to help maintain pointing skills, runs as a background process working with existing software, is not vulnerable to clusters of targets or targets in the way, and does not modify the visual appearance or the feel of user interfaces. There is evidence from a prior study that PointAssist helps young children conduct pointing tasks. In this paper, we present a study evaluating PointAssist with twenty older adults (ages 66-88). The study participants benefited from greater accuracy when using PointAssist, when compared to using the "enhance pointer precision" option in Windows XP. In addition, we provide evidence of correlations between neuropsychological measures, pointing performance, and PointAssist detecting pointing difficulty.
 assistive technologies older adults accuracy pointing

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