Kinect hack lets disabled mother send email

With a Microsoft Kinect gaming accessory and a few tweaks, a hacker managed to help his mother type emails again even after she suffered from a stroke.

 

Chad Ruble set up a Kinect-based interface that let his mother move her hand around simple icons such as happy, sad, or upset, tech site TechCrunch.com reported.

 

The report said Ruble designed what TechCrunch described as a visual “dashboard” to help his mother compose simple messages.

 

He used a Kinect and some gesture recognition code from Matt Richardson to track the position of his mother's hand, then used a sample Processing sketch from Daniel Shiffman to generate and send the email by using the green arrow button.

 

"After swiping around the screen a bit, she was finally able to send an email using a few simple hand motions. She was overjoyed," TechCruhch said.

 

TechCrunch cited the hack for "actually helping folks who haven’t been able to do certain things due to physical handicaps."

 

"The best technology is technology that changes people’s lives and this is one of the purest examples of that ideal I’ve seen in a while," it said.  — TJD, GMA News