Steadying the Mouse for People with Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis | Hacker News Reader

Steadying the Mouse for People with Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis

steadymouse.com

212 pointscharlieirish38 comments

Aww shucks! Founder here. Can't say I expected this to hit the front page today. SteadyMouse[1] has been a labor of love the past several years. It actually started as a bit of a hobby project after my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease circa 2003-2004. That original hobby version from 2005 is free, if one is willing to sacrifice a bit, and read through the troubleshooting and workarounds [2].

SteadyMouse 2 is the new commercial version, and has taken so much time and effort that I've lost track. Totally worth it though, and hearing from folks [3] has made this the most fulfilling work of my life. Porting to MacOS is indeed in progress, however has been made quite difficult by the deprecation of certain API functions (the same ones that killed SmoothMouse [4])

I should clarify for the other poster as well, SteadyMouse 2 costs $43 just one time and includes minor bugfixes going forward. The $127 price is for all the future versions too (SteadyMouse 3, 4, etc.). That price is largely necessary because customer support is quite a bit more difficult when serving the community that typically needs SteadyMouse. The 70 day easy refund period allows the users to become confident it's worth it.

In between keeping an eye on the server load, I'm happy to answer any questions and am honored at the attention today.

[1] https://www.steadymouse.com/about/

[2] https://www.steadymouse.com/downloads/

[3] https://www.steadymouse.com/reviews/

[4] http://dae.me/blog/2243/macos-kernel-programming-bounty-to-r...

Thats a really cool project that looks a lot like the computer equivalent of that anti-shake spoon.

That said, my inital reaction to the homepage of your website wasn't super appealing to what your product actually does. I understand it perfectly, but I know my grandma probably wouldn't. I think this would be solved via the 'kickstart-esque' like advertising, where there is a promo video right upfront, where your product and what it does is right center screen when you go to your website, rather than a giant banner and your logo. Call it generic, but I'm thinking of one of those medical commercials that show the problem with shaky hands, and then shows the difference with steadymouse.

The manual I think would be realllly hard for my folks to understand, due to all the up-front tech talk. Rather, they'd like to know how to install it, and how to run it so that it 'just works'. For example, the entire piece you have there about versioning and user information is very confusing. Essentially, it looks like your product is only usful to very computer learned individuals who have unsteady hands. Even if I setup the software for someone, how are they going to figure out what it does or use it themselves?

other than that, I think your actual product is great and I'll certainly remember it.

Thanks for the apt feedback. The journey to make the site and product more immediately intuitive and understandable for the elderly is ongoing. I hope to eventually incorporate much of the guidance here [1].

The software itself does have lots of tips and guidance built in with the user-manual being just a backstop to that. Indeed though, getting SteadyMouse installed the first time is the hardest part. From there it's usually smooth sailing for folks. I will work towards simplifying in the future.

BTW, you may have explained why a lot of my customers are children and grandchildren finding SteadyMouse for an ailing grandparent. I did not mean to filter-out the less tech savvy!

[1] http://eldertech.org/apps-for-seniors-10-technical-tips/

What a fantastic product. Could you share some slightly more detailed info about the jitter reduction due to physical movements? The demo shows remarkable reduction of the tremor induced jitter. It looks like radar jitter I've implemented algorithms to reduce in a different life.

That's my secret sauce, however a RESNA[1] publication[2] a few years back seems to have done a bit of reverse-engineering on the old SteadyMouse 1 free version if you are interested.

[1]https://www.resna.org/

[2]https://www.resna.org/sites/default/files/10400435%252E2013%...

Very nice. Thanks. And of course I wouldn't want you to give up the secret sauce!

Have you faced any difficulties with your target audience not being able to fill in the payment form? Have you needed to process orders by phone or alternate methods? I see it's really minimal, which is great and probably lessens form abandonment.

Sahil, who's a HN user here, gets the credit for that minimalist payment form design. Gumroad is my payment processor.

It gets a lot right and allowed for product launch to happen about three months earlier than it would have otherwise. That said, email support for purchasing is occasionally required. Most folks get through it OK though.

Hey, great idea. Keep it up.

In a previous life I worked with the Department of Education for a certain state. Their head graphic designer, Fred if I remember correctly, was about 70-something and had Parkinson's. He was able to churn out amazing work using the mouse and Wacom tablet. His wife, who also worked at the DoE, would touch up his work and clean up anything caused by the tremors. Quite an amazing team.

He was also a jazz piano player in private. He created a setup where he used his electric organ as a midi controller in GarageBand. He would record himself playing and, once through, would clean up the extra notes using the note view.

I'm very happy to see technology moving forward to help those whose conditions otherwise prevent or obscure the great things they're capable of!

This looks brilliant.

I imagine certain computer industry news forums using 9px Verdana and tiny clickable areas are not that great for people with a variety of disabilities...

> 9px Verdana

It's 9pt, but I do agree that it's way too small. I got the zoom level at 150% even without having any disabilities.

Admittedly, I have work to do there. Changing to a Responsive design is high on the TODO list.

I think the OP was referring to news.ycombinator.com , not your site :-)

Oh sorry to confuse, I didn’t want to be too harsh on one of the richest websites in the world...

9px is pretty small too

About 40 years ago a University of Houston and University of Texas Medical School Professor of Psychology, Dr. Daniel E. Sheer, developed a similar system. The result: an Apple II game system for use by patients with brain damage or dysfunction to retrain the fine control of their hands. Several systems were installed in Houston area hospitals as a result of the work.

The system was adjustable to the user's tremors and had a number of parameters to adjust the "smoothness" and responsiveness of the cursor. It worked with both joystick and mouse, as I recall.

It sounds like something really innovative for those times. Do you know more about that system? Is there a disk image anywhere?

Yeah, mostly back then we sat around and beat rocks together to make arrowheads, with the occasional pause to build nuclear-capable ICBM systems, travel to the moon and back, and put frickin' death lasers on dolphins.

"really innovative"...sheesh!

And, oh yeah, we started the "War on Cancer" and the "War on Drugs".

I would be very interested in this software, more specifically for the purpose of gaming. I have a small, noticable shake continously, with some extreme twitches when I need to click a mouse button. Has some one tested it and noticed an increase in latency?

I also see that the creator of the software is here, do you know if it has been tested by gamers with parkinsons or other afflictions that creates twitches/shakes/tremors?

Would love to try it out, but even at the price point and the 70 day return policy I can't justify it :(

Interesting you mention that. A lot of recent focus has gone into support for gamers. There was some effort to augment high end mice by taking a high DPI high sample rate and turning it into a smoother signal, while still being responsive. See here [1] for more details. I intend to keep improving SteadyMouse in this direction as time goes on. Gaming can be very freeing for folks.

[1] https://www.steadymouse.com/gaming/

Careful because most game companies are willing to throw accessibility in the trash in their fight against cheating/botting. Use of any such tool may earn a ban!

Of course there are plenty of single player and/or offline games where cheating doesn't affect the community so much, and there isn't any banning going on.

If there are any companies and/or online multi-player games that specifically encourage those with accessibility issues to participate with the help of assistive technologies, I would be happy to hear about them. I'm a fan of quadriplegic Twitch streamer NoHandsKen, who unfortunately hasn't been streaming lately but I'm sure is enjoying the latest Path of Exile update, along with most of the Blizzard games. He has trouble with things that require a key press, like jumping in World of Warcraft. According to Ken, Blizzard has specifically rejected requests to make this specific action accessible.

PS. If you've got Amazon Prime and haven't given this month's associated "free" Twitch subscription to anyone, I recommend NoHandsKen!

What a great idea. You'd think MSFT and AAPL would implement this as an accessibility option.

Awesome product. The prominent "Made in the USA" marketing on the About page seemed strange. Does the target audience tend to be xenophobic and like to know that it wasn't developed in some foreign country?

What is xenophobic about it being made in the US?

Flip the logic in the middle there, and you'll be asking the right question.

While I don't expected people to work for free and this is a niche product, the $127 seeems excessive at more than the cost of an whole operating system. Seems like something Microsoft should include in the first place.

It actually seemed really low to me. My understanding is that accessibility software that's trying to make a profit usually needs to charge a much higher price, since it's focused on a much smaller set of users. (And people are willing to pay the higher price because it's so important to them.)

For example, the base version of the JAWS screen reader is $900:

https://store.freedomscientific.com/collections/software-pro...

Sublime charges a fair penny for what is a text editor and many KVMs are steeply priced as well. For the cost of the Adobe products you could buy multiple operating systems or whole workstations.

In general, I'd say developers have quite a bit of freedom to price their software based on their effort or the benefit it provides.

Why is "cost of an operating system" the relevant benchmark?

Agreed. This completely ignores the massive economies of scale OS's realize.

And the ecosystem they promote. The more windows boxes, the more MS Office licenses.

See gottebp's comment for more, but much of the price is to cover support for a group of users where it's seldom easy or quick.

Edit: thanks autocorrect

You should see the cost of other accessibility software if you think this is expensive.

ZoomText for visual difficulties, for example, costs up to $1200. JAWS screen reader is $900 for home use. And they charge EXTRA for the ability to use Remote Desktop.

On one hand, I feel like they are really gouging people who have no other choice if they want to use a computer. On the other hand, I know the market is going to be a lot smaller than it would be for your average software...

It really creates a cost divide just for the ability to use a computer and get on the internet.

I don't think so, no. If I needed this software, I'd be very happy to see that price tag and know that the programmer has a sustainable business model and can continue supporting the software for as long as I need it. $127 to make computers accessible to someone who previously found them totally impossible is very fair. If (when) my parents need it at some point, I'll get it for them without a second thought.

It looks like there's a $43 option without updates.

This reminds me of Liftware products[1]. They make self stabilizing utensils for a similar market. Pretty cool stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNwfXeLlqsU

And their physical product starts at $195 as a point of reference, however apples-to-oranges the comparison may be.

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