Hawking used assistive technology to compensate for mobility and speech difficulties. He used a thumb switch and a blink-switch attached to his glasses to control his computer. By squeezing his cheek muscles and "blinking" an infra-red switch was activated and he was able to scan and select characters on the screen in order to compose speeches, surf the Internet, send e-mail and "speak" through a voice synthesizer. Stephen Hawking continued to be active in his research and personal life because he developed effective strategies for personal care, speaking, writing, and research activities that compensated for functional limitations imposed by ALS.
His experiences illustrated the following:. Search Menu. Date Updated :. Background Dr. Solution Dr. Equalizer first ran on an Apple II computer linked to a speech synthesizer made by a company called Speech Plus. This system was then adapted by David Mason, the engineer husband of one of Hawking's nurses, to a portable system that could be mounted on one of the arms of a wheelchair.
With this new system, Hawking was able to communicate at a rate of 15 words per minute. However, the nerve that allowed him to move his thumbs kept degrading. By , Hawking's hand was too weak to use the clicker. His graduate assistant at the time then devised a switching device called the "cheek switch.
Since then, Hawking has achieved the feat of writing emails, browsing the internet, writing books and speaking using only one muscle. Nevertheless, his ability to communicate continued to decline. By , he managed only about one or two words per minute, so he sent a letter to Moore, saying: "My speech input is very, very slow these days. Is there any way Intel could help?
Rattner assembled a team of experts on human-computer interaction from Intel Labs, which he brought over to Cambridge for Hawking's 70th birthday conference, "The State of the Universe," on January 8, We hope that this team has a breakthrough and identifies a technique that allows him to communicate at levels he had a few years ago.
Hawking had been too ill to attend his own birthday party, so he met the Intel experts some weeks later at his office in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge.
She told me that people in wheelchairs can still do amazing things. Looking back, I realize how prophetic that was. After the Intel team introduced themselves, Haussecker took the lead, explaining why they were there and what their plans were. Haussecker continued speaking for 20 minutes, when, suddenly, Hawking spoke. It took him 20 minutes to write a salutation of about 30 words. It stopped us all in our tracks. It was poignant. We now realized that this was going to be a much bigger problem than we thought.
At the time, Hawking's computer interface was a program called EZ Keys, an upgrade from the previous softwares and also designed by Words Plus. It provided him with a keyboard on the screen and a basic word-prediction algorithm. A cursor automatically scanned across the keyboard by row or by column and he could select a character by moving his cheek to stop the cursor.
EZ Keys also allowed Hawking to control the mouse in Windows and operate other applications in his computer. He surfed the web with Firefox and wrote his lectures using Notepad. He also had a webcam that he used with Skype. The Intel team envisaged an upheaval of Hawking's archaic system, which would involve introducing new hardware. Gaze tracking couldn't lock on to Hawking's gaze, because of the drooping of his eyelids. Before the Intel project, Hawking had tested EEG caps that could read his brainwaves and potentially transmit commands to his computer.
Somehow, they couldn't get a strong enough brain signal. They weren't able to get a strong enough signal-to-noise. When that happens, the muscles begin to atrophy from a lack of use and eventually stop working altogether. Even involuntary movements like breathing cease. In the s, Hawking's condition worsened and he started slurring his words due to his lack of muscle control; he completely lost speech capabilities after a surgery in , according to Biography.
At first, Hawking relied on a hand-held clicker for help choosing his words, which were then synthesized to speech. When he lost the use of his hands, Hawking needed an alternative to a clicker and that's when he switched to the use of a system that detects face movement. The program run by Intel that allowed Hawking to select characters and words is called ACAT or assistive context-aware toolkit.
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