Hand Gestured Keyboard

Inspiration

At first, our story was about creating one of the most innovative accessible projects. For people without detailed hand movements, we created a input system to replace the keyboard.

What it does

The system we created completely replaces the keyboard in a non-intrusive way; the system is comprised of four components; the gyroscope, the touch sensor, the LCD display and the gesture sensor. To select a key to input in the range of a to z, you rotate your left hand with the attached gyroscope; in segments of 10 degrees, rotation from 0 degrees selects the a character and rotation of 250 degrees selects the z character. To confirm input, we swipe right with your right hand. To input a space, we swipe up or down; and to delete, we swipe left. To switch character sets to numerical and punctuation, we toggle the touch sensor and switch sets. Input confirmation works similarly. lastly, the LCD display will shortly show what the system is capturing in terms of input.

How we built it

We used a Arduino Due, as well as mutiple i2c 4-pin connectors for all the components.

Challenges we ran into

We had a radical idea change about halfway into the project; at first, we were designing an innovative useless project as a button on wheels which would move away from your hand when you approached the button. However, we realised that we wanted to reach further and higher with an accessibility hack that would revolutionize input methods. In addition, the irregularity of resources available and many workshops planned throughout the makeathon meant that time management was essential; the time constraints strained our progress throughout the project but we managed to get things successfully working in the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of being able to fully utilize the sensor components; as the documentation was less that desired, we managed to get them working on our own. In addition, we were able to achieve our high reaching ambitions of a whole other system of input to improve accessibility.

What we learned

We gained invaluable and insightful experience in the process of designing projects, execution and group management and time management. Working together was a challenge we enjoyed and collaboration around the Arduino systems and i2c connections improved our learning faster than we would have if we tried individually.

What's next for Hand Gestured Keyboard

We hope to be able to attach our project to a PC and have it act as a real keyboard as an improvement to our prototype. It is still in its early stages, but we have many ideas on how to improve and augment our system.