Patent Document ID: 10037088
Application ID: 15311162

Base Claim:
1. A method of creating a keyboard state table mapping a chording keyboard state k to a symbol s, for a chording keyboard comprising K keyboards states and a symbol set of S symbols, comprising the steps of: a) constructing an array of K*(K−1) entries wherein each entry represents a keyboard state transition of the chording keyboard from a first keyboard state k 1 to a second keyboard state k 2 ; b) constructing an exercise adapted to be performed by users of the chording keyboard wherein the users use the chording keyboard to generate a series of keyboard state transitions; c) measuring the difficulty with which a user generates each transition, such difficulty, as a single scalar, the, “psychomotor cost” of that transition; d) aggregating the psychomotor costs from different users of the exercise, for each transition in the array; e) entering the aggregated psychomotor cost for each transition in the array; f) identifying a text corpus comprising sequential symbols from the symbol set; g) creating a first keyboard state table that associates with each of the K keyboard states one symbol from the set of S symbols; assigning the first keyboard state table a keyboard state table under test; h) encoding the text corpus using the keyboard state table under test; i) summing the total psychomotor costs for all of the sequential transitions to complete step h, using the array to determine the psychomotor cost for each transition used in step h); this sum being the total psychomotor cost for the keyboard state table under test using the corpus; k) creating a set of alternative keyboard state tables by permuting a different subset of table lines from the keyboard state table under test; wherein the size of the subset is Z table lines; l) performing steps h) and i) for each table in the set of alternative keyboard state tables; wherein each table in the set of alternative keyboard state tables now becomes one keyboard state table under test; thus creating multiple keyboard state tables under test and copies of steps of this method; m) selecting the one table from the set of alternative keyboard state tables that has the lowest total psychomotor cost; the selected table becoming a new keyboard state table under test; n) repeating steps k) through m) until a terminating condition is reached; o) using a last selected table as the keyboard state table created by this method; wherein the chording keyboard is free of a requirement to release all keys between chords.

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Claim 5:
5. The method of claim 1 wherein: the chording keyboard is adapted to be used fully by a single hand.