Robots harvesting the tobacco plants

Akin to an industrial or automated manufacturing process, robotically-tended machines plant seeds, tend to growing plants, add genetic specifications, and harvest the plants upon maturity. The weeks-long process is short compared to traditional methods of vaccine production which can take several months.

More coverage on this story in BUToday and Engineer Magazine

Check out the article and video (originally published in BU Today) below.

BU Today- Every day, our world grows more digital and more of our lives migrates to an electronic format. But Margrit Betke, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of computer science, believes the networked world isn’t nearly as inclusive as it ought to be.

“The community of people with severe disabilities is not really well served by computer science,” Betke says. “Many people impaired by diseases like multiple sclerosis or ALS cant type Google searches. They cant play video games, and they cant click on a friend’s e-mail.”

So, in collaboration with James Gips, a Boston College professor of computer science, and several of her students, Betke has spent the last eight years developing a camera mouse that greatly expands accessibility to the digital world. The camera mouse software uses a computer webcam to lock onto and track a chosen section of the users face — a nostril or the tip of an eyebrow, for example — and then links that persons head movement to a cursor on the screen. Move right and the cursor goes right. Move left and it reverses direction. Pause for several seconds over a link and it clicks.

Betke and her fellow researchers have adapted a camera mouse to work with several popular programs, such as Microsoft Word. They’ve also created custom software that allows computer users with disabilities to type e-mails, edit photographs, create music, and fight space aliens, among other activities.

In spring 2007, after a failed attempt to build a company around the new technology, Betke and Gips decided to give camera mouse away online. These days, about 2,500 people download it every month. The researchers get frequent e-mails from people as far away as Australia and Uzbekistan, thanking them and asking for technical assistance.

“With software, there’s always an issue of maintenance,” says Betke. Requests to fix a software bug or make camera mouse compatible with the latest operating system always get highest priority. A request for a camera mouse version of Flight Simulator, on the other hand, becomes a candidate for a class project. Betke’s students also work as volunteers in places like the Boston Home, a nursing care center for adults with neurodegenerative diseases, whose residents have used camera mouse.

What’s next? Betke hopes to make camera mouse more adaptable to the wide range of mobility limitations, arranging navigation buttons to match a persons most controlled range of motion, for example, or accommodating the slow diminishment of a user’s skills.

“It’s a challenge that is facing all human-computer interface research,” says Betke. “We can adapt our own system with user profiles and all that, but to actually have the computer figure it out for us and help us along is a very different story.”