Smithsonian.com reports that MIT researchers believe the way you press the keys when you type might be a predictor of Parkinson’s disease. The issue is not how many words you type per minute, but how long you hold each key down before releasing it. They measure this in microseconds. (Actually, they measure “with sub-millisecond accuracy” – whoa!)
Read the article here, and/or watch the video:
Click here to participate in their research via an app.
Postscript
I was shocked above when I noted the researchers measure keystrokes “with sub-millisecond accuracy” because it made me remember my doctoral dissertation in Applied Linguistics (1994, Teachers College Columbia University). My research also looked at a writer’s keystrokes on the computer as he drafted a variety of texts , except I used videotapes of the computer screen with an added digital timer that counted out each frame of tape – about 30 frames per second.
My dissertation project was to track and measure all cursor pauses greater than 0.5 seconds, and then make some sense of them. Some of the questions that drove me:
- During the total time the writer was drafting new text, for what portion of the time was the cursor inactive?
- What was the mean pause length?
- What was the average number of keystrokes that the writer typed between pauses?
- What was the production rate for words and keystrokes if pause time was removed?
- What happened after each pause? Did the writer continue writing the same sentence? Did the writer start a new sentence or paragraph? Did the cursor back up into the already-written text to add, delete or change something?
I found the work interesting, but to measure all the cursor pauses with an accuracy of 1/30th of a second, I had to watch the video tapes in super slow-mo, often proceeding frame by frame. It was painstaking, exasperating work that took months to complete, and completely ruined my eyes.
Now I see that the MIT researchers have the nit-picky work done for them by keystroke recording super devices.
Sigh!
I will join.