Camera Mouse: Dwell vs. Computer Vision-Based Intentional Click Activation Rafael Zuniga and John Magee (B ) Math and Computer Science Department, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA jmagee@clarku.edu Abstract. People with severe motion impairments may face chal- lenges using assistive interface devices for common point-and-click tasks. A motion tracking interface, the Camera Mouse, allows users to con- trol a mouse pointer with their head and click by dwelling the pointer over a target. Previous studies evaluated the use of an attached sen- sor (ClickerAID) as an alternative to the dwell-time clicking. However, the sensor’s proprietary hardware is a barrier to adaptation. Here, we present a computer-vision based alternative that can be used to actu- ate mouse clicks. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of our interface and compare to previous results. Although quantitative evaluation did not achieve the same speed and acuracy as the other measures, the non- contact approach to intentional click activation demonstrates benefits compared to the other techniques. Keywords: Mouse-replacement interfaces · Camera Mouse · Dwelling · Intentional muscle contractions 1 Introduction The Camera Mouse 1 [1, 8] system has been developed to provide computer access for people with severe disabilities. The system tracks the computer users move- ments with a video camera and translates them into the movements of the mouse pointer on the screen. This system also provides a clicking feature with dwell- time selection. This involves hovering over a button for a certain period of time in order to generate a click. While this clicking approach is intuitive and easy to use for some people, it has several disadvantages for other users and for use in certain applications. Anytime the mouse stops moving, a click can be gener- ated, potentially causing unintended selection of whatever happens to be under the link. It is hard to click small buttons or links because users have problems keeping the pointer on top of the button for the time required. Other clicking interfaces such as the ClickerAID [2, 7] solve the problem of inadvertent clicking but do so with an attached sensor in order to detect a single intentional muscle 1 The Camera Mouse is freely available as a download at http://www.cameramouse. org/. c  Springer International Publishing AG 2017 M. Antona and C. Stephanidis (Eds.): UAHCI 2017, Part II, LNCS 10278, pp. 455–464, 2017. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58703-5 34