Boğaziçi University develops new ‘E’ keyboard
A group of researchers from a Turkish university develop a new keyboard for Turkish Language users, which provides high performance and is convenient to use
The Istanbul-based Boğaziçi University developed a new keyboard with Turkish letters, the university announced on Tuesday, February 24.
The new keyboard, the E keyboard, and will compete with the previous F and Q keyboards for Turkish computer users.
In a written statement, the university declared that a group of researchers under the leadership of Mahmut Ekşioğlu has worked for three years to develop the new keyboard.
The team leader also argued that their E keyboard is developed based on experiments and mathematical calculations.
Within the scope of the project, the development team took their invention under several tests with participants of different ages, and the ergonomic criterion was determined by these experimental studies. The speed capacity for each finger was also determined according to the speed with which each finger types a single button.
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“The performance in writing rises with the new E keyboard and it provides more healthy and comfortable usage,” Mahmut Ekşioğlu said.
Ekşioğlu stated that the new keyboard was developed by studying the ergonomic layout of letters and so it is more optimal. He said that in the E Keyboard, letters were laid out taking into consideration the capacity of fingers and their moving space.
The Boğaziçi University team has studied the binary combinations of the fingers, the time needed to type two buttons one after another, and the letter combination of the Turkish language.
"Taking those into consideration, we obtained 152 keyboard models," Ekşioğlu said, adding that they had arranged performance and healthy experiments for the three best models.
He said that in experiments they had also used the electronic gloves to capture motion data and measure the tendon movements.
"To write a typical Turkish text, using the E keyboard makes you use much less tendon movements than with the F or Q keyboard," he added.
Turkish writers use the QWERTY or Q keyboard, which is nearly the same as the English version with some different buttons for the Turkish letters ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü.
However, the Turkish alphabet is different from its English counterpart, and is thus concentrated on the right side of the keyboard.
The FGĞIOD or F keyboard is another type of keyboard developed by Turks and that has nothing in common with the QWERTY or Q keyboard, which is the most internationalized keyboard. The F keyboard is hardly used among Turkish users.
Ekişoğlu said that the F Keyboard is better than the Q keyboard for writing in the Turkish language.
He added that they have not found any literature about the methods that were used to develop the F keyboard.
He said that while developing the F keyboard, the Turkish letter frequency of the Turkish National Corpus was not taken into consideration, but rather that of the 1950's Turkish dictionary.
"The index fingers are overloaded," Ekşioğlu said.
He said that the E keyboard is developed based on experiments and mathematical calculations, while the F keyboard has no scientific basis.
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