ASSISTIVE KEYBOARD FOR STROKE SURVIVOR

Challenge: Balz is a passionate and committed electric engineer. At 57 years old, Balz lost his motor skills on the left arm due to a stroke. One year later, he contacted HackaHealth for help. Balz is able to perform some small movements with his thumb and index, and he would like to use those to control some functionalities on his PC in order to assist his daily living and to promote the use of his residual skills for rehabilitation purposes.

The goal of the project is to design a HID (Human Interface Device) to enable Balz to use such movements to control some keyboard keys (Ctrl, Shift,…).

Solution: Hand2keyPressedRehab is based on the Leap Motion technology. Using the device, the interface allows to detect the distance between the pinching of each finger with respect to the thumb. When this distance reaches a defined threshold, the user will be able to press specific keys. 

The project is released as open-source, and can be downloaded from this link below!