Communication Matters Conference 2019

I attended the 2019 Communication Matters Conference in Leeds on Monday. I presented a poster on three of my assistive technology projects using the BBC micro:bit and gave a ’lightning talk’ - 15 slides, auto advancing every 25 seconds. I wrote the PowerPoint presentation using Libreoffice on my Linux distro. Just before giving the talk I realised I had not tested it in Windows, which the conference PC was running with. Of course. Why use Linux for free when you can pay for Windows? Fortunately the slides displayed and auto-advanced correctly. This was my first time presenting at a conference, so I was a little nervous. I think it all went well. I didn’t notice anybody asleep and nothing was thrown.

A number of people showed interest in the poster. I presented my handshake, give-me-a-minute and hand-wave projects. Hopefully this interest will carry over to implementing these projects to help people access communication devices.

If any of these projects are of use for you or somebody you know, please get in touch. Contact details are on my home page.

I finally realised that trying to implement vision based controllers in the Real World was too much for Little Matty working on my time off from my paid work offshore. I managed to demonstrate the idea of using depth cameras to create virtual controls using head tracking: https://mattoppenheim.com/headbanger-controlling-software-with-head-motion/ before moving on.

I was gratified to see a presentation from a Japanese team that succeeded with depth camera based controllers: http://gesture-interface.jp/en/. The Japanese team have been working on this project for 5 years and have 9 people working on the team, according to the team member I talked with at the conference. So even simple sounding ideas using off the shelf technology can take significant resources and software development to implement in the Real World.