A facial expression mediated natural user interface communication model for children with motor impairments

This work was motivated by the limitations of the existing Assistive and Augmentative Communication tools to help children with Cerebral Palsy who have Motor Impairments (CP-MI). A novel model was designed, developed, and evaluated in order to help CP-MI children. The proposed model monitors and detects in real time the critical expressions on the CP-MI children's faces. Subsequently, the critical expression is sent to the caretaker either by an audio alarm or as an SMS message through the mobile phone. Multiple pilot tests on the developed prototype were performed with normal human prior to the evaluation with the CP-MI children. Later, 21 CP-MI children from a special education school were being invited to participate in the evalution. The evaluation results and findings showed that the idea of adopting the facial expression as an alternate communcation medium is workable for the CP-MI children