MouthPad – In-Mouth Bluetooth Mouse Uses Tongue Sensitive Trackpad

Heat pointer is great and I really hope Apple follows it up with building proper eye tracking hardware and software into Macs & iDevices. It's such a great opportunity to improve UX and reduce RSI for everyone by sharing the load among more input sources. I've tried the Tobii stuff but it's not great, no solution out there has quite nailed the calibration nor the UX yet, as it requires OS-level UX changes.

Every input source has a point after which it causes fatigue or pain - hands, head, eyes, tongue, feet, etc. The more the load is spread out, the better! This MouthPad looks fantastic as another input method to share the load.

Same setup here. Hoping for even more input devices in more places to spread the load. For instance there's also some folks building ergo keyboard with trackpads near the thumbs to replicate the MacBook experience of a trackpad below spacebar for the occasional pinch zoom or scroll. And having various buttons/knobs for specialized tasks would also be great.

Exactly that. It has a flip switch to swap the left/right buttons when you change hands, but I never use that as I'm used to thinking of right click as index finger and left click as middle finger on either hand.

I love this. Not just for restoring pointing capabilities to people without the use of their hands or dexterity, but for how unintrusive it is.

How awesome would it would be to use this to control a head-mounted display like Google Glass? Imagine if I could be out in public and operate a computer without it ever being obvious that I'm doing anything—without it ever getting in the way, without it ever distracting others.

Maybe we finally have a matching input method to go with those contact-lens HUDs.

And oh man, imagine the covert opportunities this would open up. Phone not allowed? That's OK, I have a computer in my head. My limbs can be full or even tied up and I'd still be able to compute. In a threatening situation where I can't move? That's fine, I can call for help or start a recording with just the use of my tongue, without putting myself in any additional danger.

Plus, tongue control lacks a lot of the issues that BCIs normally bring up, like the difficulty of inhibiting random electrical signals in my brain. With my tongue, there is no doubt that any movement I make was entirely intended. I can be faster and more efficient because I can perform actions with more certainty and less ambiguity.

I've joined the waitlist. Digits crossed that this doesn't end up costing tens of thousands of dollars, although there's no price listed so it probably will.

I'll link to an open source project [0] because I don't want to throw mud at any particular company, and it is a cool project to develop for anyone motivated enough.

Having said that, it's a dumb product because the cane is very often beaten up, or misplaced so it's an expectation that it will need replacing every 12-18 months. The additional weight needed for the hardware throws off the natural balance of the cane making it more difficult to use and also interferes with the haptic feedback users depend on from a "dumb" cane. Also, the white cane is relatively cheap ($20-50 USD) - smart canes are usually $1000+, or if the "smarts" come as attachments to an analog cane, they would range $300-500 (my intelligence is 2-3 years old, so it might be higher now), so out of reach to most blind people. None are stand-alone and require synching with the phone, but many users who are tech savvy enough to use one of these already uses a navigation app, so one of the key benefits (GPS navigation) is redundant.

Overall the drawbacks (price, negative impact on usability, natural wear and tear) greatly outweigh the possible benefits.

Everyone in the industry is genuine, there is very little profiteering, and the goal across the board is to improve people's lives, but these products are always from young techies (student or technically advanced blind person) who made an awesome project that should be celebrated. But they should also be one-offs and open-sourced, with the money and effort spent on launching smart canes that will inevitably fail in the market better spent elsewhere.

[0] https://maker.pro/arduino/projects/arduino-smart-cane-for-th...