Amma Kosam

September 14, 2012

Man hacks Kinect to help his mother e-mail after stroke

Chad Ruble's mother suffered a stroke that led to aphasia, a disorder that affects language processing but not intelligence.
Chad's mother Lindy was unable to recognize text and thus unable to use a keyboard.
So Chad did what any computer-savvy son should: he hacked a Kinect to help her.
After designing a visual dashboard of emoticons (happy, sad, angry, tired, etc.), each of which can be further qualified by an amount (expressed as signal strength -- one, two, three, or four bars), Chad says he turned to a Kinect, some gesture recognition code, and the simple OpenNI library for Processing to track the position of his mother's hand. A green arrow button sends the email and a red X resets the screen.

The hack is pretty straightforward and the features are at this point relatively crude, but that doesn't make his mother's smile when she first uses it (see below) any less powerful.

Chad writes on his blog that he plans to use other boards and pages "for a greater variety of messaging" while maintaining "a super simple interface" for his mom, and he may also include the ability to snap and send a photo of herself instead of relying on generic emoticon avatars.

[media=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWG7edyw7B8&feature=player_embedded[/media]
[img]http://asset2.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/09/09/Picture_1_610x400.png[/img]

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