Smartphone app to help people with arm paralysis

Now even people with arm paralysis can use smartphones with South Korean researchers developing a new app called 'Dowell'.

The app is designed to assist people, who can not use their hands well, and is targeted at users with muscular dystrophy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), stroke and other ailments that restrict movement.

The app has a user interface for disabled people that works with a variety of input methods, which are known as computer assistive devices.

It can receive information from a trackball mouse, head-tracking camera and mouth stick, which is a tool for manipulating a cursor with the mouth.

"Until now, people with upper-limb disabilities have been limited to PCs if they want to use computers," said developer Ahn Hyun-jin, a student at Seoul National University's Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology.

The project will be presented at the 2015 Computer-Human Interaction Conference (CHI) in Seoul this week, Computer World reported.

Ahn plans to release the application to the Samsung Apps platform in a few months.