The Interface Usage Skills Test: An Open Source Tool for Real-Time Quantitative Evaluation for Clinicians and Researchers

Assistive machines endow people with limited mobility the opportunity to live more independently. However, operating these machines poses risks to the safety of the human operator as well as the surrounding environment. Thus, proper user training is an essential step towards independent control and use of functionally assistive machines. A variety of control interfaces can be employed by the human to issue control signals to the device, dependent on the residual mobility and level of injury of the human operator. Proficiency in operating the interface of choice precedes the skill in operating the assistive machine. In this systems paper, we present an open source tool for quantifying user skill in operating various interfaces devices.