Gesture keyboard to help Indian poor

Researchers in India have developed a gesture-based keypad that can be used with minimal training to input many of the country's languages – 22 of them 'official', but many more that are spoken by smaller groups of people.

The problem is typified by Hindi, which is spoken by 400 million people and requires 36 consonants and 12 modifiers that can combine in 1,500 different ways, some of which have short forms.

Hindi keyboards take far longer to learn than their English equivalents, and with a growing amount of official business being done via computers in local languages non-typists can be at a distinct disadvantage.

The researchers at HP Labs India have overlaid a soft keyboard showing the consonants onto a small Acecad digitiser pad.

These can be combined with a number of gestures to generate the Unicodes for the language's Devanagari script; the Hindi version of Windows takes care of the short forms.

The principle can be used with any phonetic script. Shekhar Borgaonkar, director of the Bangalore lab's affordable-access department, reckons that someone literate in Hindi can use the system within 15 minutes.

The idea is one of several being developed by HP to extend government help to people in the countryside who may be at the mercy of middlemen and corrupt officials, to say nothing of the notorious inertia of Indian bureaucracy.

A project called Coffei provides a framework for the creation, deployment and administration of electronic forms, using open standards such as InkML to extract data from a keyboard or any pen-based device such as the gesture pad or a Tablet PC.

Lab director Ajay Gupta demonstrated a system by which farmers in remote villages could use a certified form, downloaded in a cybercafé, to gain a bank loan.

The form provides a list of crops that a farmer is growing, as certified by an official inspector; the details are shown both in a readable form and an encrypted barcode.

The bank can read both and the barcode to check that information on the form has not been tampered with.

The system incidentally stops officials going slow on delivering certificates unless their palms are oiled with a few rupees.

Gupta says the system could also be used to certify qualifications certificates for people seeking jobs and visas.

Another system developed at the labs uses spare bandwidth in satellite TV systems to deliver educational material in local languages that can be printed out and used in class.

The same system can be used to deliver public-service information to areas that otherwise might not get it.