Eyeboard++: an enhanced eye gaze-based text entry system in Hindi

Of late, eye gaze has become an important modality of text entry in large and small display digital devices. Despite many tools being developed, issues like minimizing dwell time and visual search time, enhancing accuracy of composed text, eye-controlled mouse movement stability etc. are yet to be addressed. Moreover, eye typing interfaces having a large number of keys suffer from many problems like selecting wrong characters, more character searching time etc. Some linguistic issues often decline in minimizing dwell time incurred for character by character based eye typing task. The aforementioned issues are prominently evolved in case of Indian languages for its many language related issues. In this paper, we propose a gaze-based text entry system EyeBoard++ for Hindi, national language of India which minimizes dwell time by introducing word completion and word prediction methodologies side by side mitigates visual search time by highlighting next probable characters. Performance evaluation shows that proposed interface achieves text entry rate on an average 9.63 words per minute. As designed, the proposed interface can effortlessly be suited in medium-sized display devices like Tablet PC, PDA etc. The proposed interface design approach, in fact, provides a solution to deal with complexity in Indian languages and can be extended to many other languages in the world. Also, the developed system can be used by the people with motor disabilities.