Development of a monitoring system for keyboard users' performance

To precisely evaluate the typing performance of a VDT user, a program named KBlog was developed to record the typing activity under the Microsoft Windows operating system. This program is small and simply framed in order to avoid overloading of the operating system. Without interfering with the typing task, this program can record the time of every pressing and releasing movement of each keystroke at the millisecond level. The accuracy and reliability of KBlog was tested by comparing time intervals recorded by KBlog to time intervals of keyboard output electrical signals recorded by an oscilloscope. In the regression analysis on these two indicators, results of high correlation coefficients of almost 1.000 and intercepts within acceptable levels of around 1 ms indicated sufficient accuracy and reliability of this program. Further applications are discussed in this paper concerning both laboratory and field researches.