I think both the eye control system and the head mouse systems are both really clever and good inventions for disabled people. Both I think are good in different ways, for example the eye control system is really good for people who can’t move their head very well, but at the same time the head mouse is a technique to use for computer operators who can’t use the eye control system as well.

For me, I think personally although I’ve had a lot more experience with the head mouse, I think I’d prefer to use the eye control method of using the computer. This is because as I design web sites, I think it is easier when doing something delicate or tricky to stare at it with your eyes rather than having to keep your head in the same place while you wait for it to click and there’s a lot more movement you can do quicker with your eyes. Plus when I breathe as I’m on a ventilator, when I breathe in and out and I’m concentrating on trying to keep my head still sometimes it doesn’t work and the cursor shoots off.

Also thinking of improvements, I think it would be good to improve on making both the head mouse and eye control systems so that it doesn’t react as much to light, because it’s annoying when you have to keep trying to stop it reacting to light. I also think that there should be a beam built into computers e.g. laptops so that you don’t have to set anything up you can just turn on the computer as normal and it detects if there’s not a manual mouse attached and just switches over to the beam that’s built in so then you can use either eye control or the head mouse depending on which program you have starting up automatically when the computer starts up.

Sarah Yeo 11 April 2006

Sarah using the Quick Glance 2 system