Saturday, July 30, 2011

Typing effort analyzer in Ruby

I've been working on RePhraser over the course of the last 6 months. RePhraser is a piece of software which aims to help professionals in writing repetitive texts quickly. Unfortunately I haven't been able to make it available to a broader audience yet mainly due to the fact that it only works reliably in Internet Explorer and that there are still some basic features missing. Even so, I've uploaded a short demo here.


RePhraser assists you by anticipating and displaying words while you are typing them. Imagine you being a physician who writes the word "immunocytochemically". You would start to type "immu" whereas RePhraser would bring up all the words that start with "immu". There would be simple words like "immune", "immunogen" or more complicated words like the aforementioned "immunocytochemically". In fact there are a lot of words that starts with "immu". RePhraser would be pretty useless if it displayed easy words like "immune" or "immunogen" at this point because professional writers type those words much faster than RePhraser could display them. To solve this problem RePhraser uses a typing effort model. The basic idea is to display words which are harder to type first and to ignore words which are easy to write. To do so RePhraser rates every word based on the carpalx typing effort model. The carpalx typing effort model takes account of things like weak fingers (like pinky and ring finger), travel distance of fingers, same-finger typing (e.g "uhm"), balanced hand-use vs. right-hand priority etc...


I implemented the carpalx typing effort model in ruby and published source code and Gem on https://github.com/Enceradeira/teanalyzer. The project is named Teanalyzer, which is an abbreviation of typing effort analyzer.


What do you think about Teanalyzer? Or are you interested in RePhraser? Please drop a line or contact me!