Optimal keyboard design by using particle swarm optimization
Fecha
20182018
Institución
Resumen
The use of appropriate keyboards clearly improves the typing
activity, making the task faster and the workstation more comfortable.
On the contrary, intensive use of inappropriate/unergonomic keyboards
may lead to musculoskeletal injuries. During the last years the design of
optimal keyboards as appeared as an interesting problem from UI design.
The idea is to arrange the letters on a keyboard according to a given
ergonomic criteria in order to maximize typing speed, and reduce fatigue
as well as typing errors. In this paper, we focus on the letter assignment
problem, whose goal is to minimize the cost of the keyboard which is
computed according to the Fitts law and the movement time among
keys. In particular, we employ particle swarm optimization (PSO), which
is one of the pioneers metaheuristics that has been largely used to solve
different problems from multiple application domains.
Keywords: Letter assignment problem · Keyboard optimization
Metaheuristics