Sample artwork made using ePad 2.0 software

1. Description

ePad 2.0 is a computerized touch-screen tool for art therapists. The tool allows therapists to design individualized computer applications for particular clients. The resulting applications look like painting programs, but are usually simpler, can follow the therapeutic goals of the therapist designer, and can be adapted to particular user’s needs, taking into account visual, auditory and motor capabilities. The tool also contains an artificially intelligent program that assists the art therapist in the task of keeping the user engaged.

The first version of ePad system is described on this website: epad.uwaterloo.ca

2. Features

The main features of ePad software are the painting functionality, the ability to create and modify the drawing interface on the fly and the prompting functionality designed to recapture the user’s attention and to guide the set-up process. On one hand the tool is simple enough for persons with limited cognitive abilities (such as people with dementia) to use. On the other hand the tool is highly customizable and flexible to enable art therapists and caretakers to design interfaces for specific activities and meet the needs of particular clients.

2.1. GUI

Currently the system features two rotating drawers which are filled with widgets (such as brushes and paints). Widgets can be dragged out of the drawers and placed anywhere on the screen, when a drawer is open. When a drawer is closed, its objects cannot be moved. To remove an object, user can place it back into the original drawer.

Canvas can be moved, resized and rotated when one of the rotating drawers is open.

Another drawer located on the top of the screen contains control buttons such as Save, Load, Clear, Reset and Print.

2.2. Painting

Basic painting has been implemented, currently the system has 5 types of painting tools:

Pencil: draws with lines of various thickness)
Hard bristle brushes, both round and rectangular: bristles are simulated using a cloud of randomly generated particles
“Spider brush”: draws thicker lines and connects points that are close enough with thin lines (which looks somewhat like a spider web)
Eraser: draws thick lines of the same colour as background
Stamp: prints a single-colour image onto the canvas

Most of these tools have options, like size, that can be specified. Colour of the brush depends on the selected paint, which can be added to the screen in the same way as other widgets.

Painting widget examples:

2.3. Prompting

ePad application features 3 types of prompts:

Set-up prompts that help a new user to create a new drawing interface (one for the paints drawer and another for the brushes drawer)

Each set up prompt is displayed after a certain period after the application is started and only if the drawer it is related to was not opened yet

Engagement prompts that are displayed to recapture the attention of a user

These prompts are displayed after a certain period of inactivity (when no item on the screen is touched)

Exit prompt that is displayed after a long period of inactivity and presents a user with buttons to save, print or reset the painting

2.4. Saving and Loading

The application is able to save and then load both the current painting and the interface layout. Saved information is stored in .sav files in /data/save folder by default. Each save file has a data folder with the same name that contains drawing image, interface layout and a thumbnail image. If a certain save file should be removed, delete the corresponding data folder as well. To make the future extension easier, I created a couple of Java annotations and a special class to automate the saving and loading procedures for widgets.

Sample user experience:
Click the screenshots below and read their descriptions for more information.

3. Installation

Download source code

ePad application requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run. Make sure that you have at least JRE 6 installed. You can use the following web page to update or install your Java: http://www.java.com/getjava.

To run the application on Windows platform simple double-click either ePad.jar or ePad.bat file in the main application folder.

3.1. Set Up

Most settings used by the application can be modified by editing settings.xml file in the \data folder. Most importantly you can specify the dimensions of the monitor, the source of touch events, location of important files such as the default layout and the timings for prompts. For a detailed description of the variables in the settings file see http://dpyryesk.github.com/ePad/ca/uwaterloo/epad/util/Settings.html.

The default layout file is loaded whenever the application is started or reset. There are 2 default layout files: layout_1080.xml and layout_768.xml that are designed for hi-resolution and low-resolution monitors respectively.

The GUI layout is stored in gui.xml file. It specifies the colour scheme of the application and drawers and declares the brushes and colours that should be added to the drawers. Usually the gui file should not be modified.

4. Development

The code of ePad tool is open-source and is available for download at http://github.com/dpyryesk/epad.

Online Javadoc is available here: http://dpyryesk.github.com/ePad.

For more information please contact me.