Why Use Words When the Mind Works Better: How Advances in Handicap Compensations Will Improve Computer to Human Interaction

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Why use Words when the Mind Works Better: How Advances in Handicap Compensations will Improve Computer to Human Interaction How can we help people affected by blindness, deafness and amputation to live in a world that relies so heavily on our senses? It is not enough to see but to hear, not enough to have a body that moves but the feel of touch and temperature. Feedback that helps us make sense of the environment around us. It is our human nature to help those who have been affected by tragedy, disease or birth defects. New research in biomechanics and neurology have given us insight and abilities to restore vision to the blind, sound to the deaf and reasonable replacements to amputees and the disabled so that they can function easily in our society with the addition of feeling in their new limbs. With these new technological methods being developed and refined it makes sense that they will be applied. It is human natures to use tools developed and refined for the handicapped and apply them in a way that the rest of society will benefit by the increased level of communication between man and machine. The goal of various methods of imputing information into our electronics has been to develop the most natural way of communicating with mechanical devices for the primary purpose we use it for. Starting with the keyboard human-computer interaction hardware has improved steadily to the mouse and now with touch screen interfaces using the “natural pointing instinct”(Pickering). Pointing is a human reaction, something innate in us all and need not be taught. There is a natural progression to the way people have communicated with computers. The popular method of controlling computers reflects the significance purpose of the computer at that time starting with keyboards when programming was the main use for computers. As computers became more main stream the mouse was

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