Cursive Eye-Writing With Smooth-Pursuit Eye-Movement Is Possible in Subjects With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder causing a progressive motor weakness of all voluntary muscles, whose progression challenges communication modalities such as handwriting or speech. The current study investigated whether ALS subjects can use Eye-On-Line (EOL), a novel eye-operated communication device allowing, after training, to voluntarily control smooth-pursuit eye-movements (SPEM) so as to eye-write in cursive. To that aim, ALS participants ( = 12) with preserved eye-movements but impaired handwriting were trained during six on-site visits.

Automaticity of online control processes in manual aiming.

Experiments that manipulated the visual feedback of the moving limb have suggested the existence of efficient and automatic online correction processes. We wanted to determine whether the latency/gain of the correction for a cursor jump are only influenced by the size of the cursor jump or whether they are also influenced by the need of a correction for the target to be reached. In Experiment 1, we used two target sizes (5 and 30 mm) and three cursor-jump amplitudes (5, 15, and 25 mm), so that for some target size/cursor-jump combinations, no correction would be needed to reach the target.