#motor control

Being able to “undo” an action online is accessibility

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally pressed a button due to my poor motor control.

And most things are “undoable”. Like if I accidentally like a post I can just… unlike it. I can unfollow, delete posts, delete comments, use backspace, close tabs.

And if I didn’t have the ability to do those things? Many tiktok and YouTube videos would have nonsense comments because I couldn’t delete something my hand did without my permission. I’d be following a shit ton of people that I intended to block, and Vice versa.

Little things are accessibility.

i think we should talk just as much about “computers autocorrecting away from ‘bad words’ with no setting to enable autocorrect for those words is ableist because people with coordination problems should have the same access to using ‘bad words’ as people without those problems”

This study is unique in considering difficulty initiating tasks of any type in real life settings, and by gathering qualitative data directly from autistic people.

Four face-to-face and 2 online (text) focus groups were conducted with 32 autistic adults (19 female, 8 male, and 5 other), aged 23–64 who were able to express their internal experiences in words. They articulate in detail the actions they have difficulty with, what makes it easier or harder to act, and the impact on their lives.

Thematic analysis of the transcripts found four overarching themes: descriptions of inertia, scaffolding to support action, the influence of wellbeing, and the impact on day-to-day activities.

Participants described difficulty starting, stopping and changing activities that was not within their conscious control. While difficulty with planning was common, a subset of participants described a profound impairment in initiating even simple actions more suggestive of a movement disorder.

Prompting and compatible activity in the environment promoted action, while mental health difficulties and stress exacerbated difficulties. Inertia had pervasive effects on participants’ day-to-day activities and wellbeing.

This overdue research opens the door to many areas of further investigation to better understand autistic inertia and effective support strategies.

link to this research article

You could control a prosthetic limb with your primary motor cortex. Right now the most advanced prosthetic hands can detect electric signals in motor nerves in the forearm to control gross movements like flexing the wrist and grasping an object, but the person has to use an app on their phone to select grip type and strength. Control could be wayyy more precise and functional if you could just link it to upper motor neurons instead of relying on peripheral nerve signals. Assuming we reach the level of precision to control visual perception well enough to play video games (which honestly seems improbable to me), you could cure most types of blindness using a camera as a prosthetic eye. 

And who knows what else you could do with the ability to connect external equipment to your cortex? Use specialized electronic sensors placed throughout the body to compensate for damaged spinal tracts? Re-route motor control from the cortex around the basal ganglia to treat Parkinson’s (one of the current therapeutic approaches basically trains the patient to do this themself)? I don’t know if it’s possible, but how cool would that be??