Toward automatic adjustment of pointing device configuration to accommodate physical impairment.

Purpose: Software was developed which makes recommendations regarding configuration of a computer pointing device, such as a mouse, to accommodate a person's physical impairment. Specifically, a software agent automatically recommends a setting for the computer's control-display gain based on observations of a user's performance in a target selection task.

Method: The software agent makes its recommendations based on available adjustment settings in the existing operating system. The agent was evaluated in studies with 12 participants who have motor impairments.

Results: The agent-selected gain was not associated with significant improvements in selection time or error-free performance compared with the operating system's default gain. Across participants and trials, gain did not have a significant effect on selection time except at the lowest gain settings tested. However, two participants did have notable and consistent improvement in selection time and error-free performance using the agent-selected gain; gain across trials had a significant effect on number of target entries and number of submovements; and a post-hoc analysis indicated improved target selection time when varying both target size and control-display gain.

Conclusion: These observations provide possible avenues for future work, although the current study indicates that changes to control-display gain, alone, are unlikely to offer improvements in speed or accuracy for the general population of people with motor impairments.