Application of Genetic Algorithm to Keyboard Arrangement Problem

The number of people who use computer for business purposes increases as technology grows. Application of ergonomics practices on computer workstations reduces musculoskeletal discomfort experienced and increased overall job satisfaction of the employees. Keyboards are available in various systems, computers to mobile devices, which have difference shapes and sizes. Keyboard size and shape is known to influence upper extremities. Alternative keyboard designs may prevent or reduce arm pain or disorders, and probably the mechanism is by reducing awkward arm postures. Previous researchers have put their effort on optimizing the character arrangement of the keyboard by taking into account the co-occurrence frequency of characters in words, typing ergonomics, and word disambiguation effectiveness. This research considers the frequency of appearance of the most used 3000 words in the English language. First, the text Analyzer calculates the frequency of each letter pair. Then, a genetic algorithm is applied to design an ergonomically optimized keyboard to minimize the total distance of finger travel among the selected alphanumeric characters. The results showed that the distance travelled obtained by the proposed keyboard layout is less than that for the QWERTY keyboard in all different types of texts, in which an average of 6.04% improvement was achieved. Therefore, the proposed design can be used for keyboards to reduce time and fatigue. Keywords: Keyboard design, Systematic layout planning, Genetic algorithm