  Teleoperation of mobile manipulators within a home environment can
significantly enhance the independence of individuals with severe motor
impairments, allowing them to regain the ability to perform self-care and
household tasks. There is a critical need for novel teleoperation interfaces to
offer effective alternatives for individuals with impairments who may encounter
challenges in using existing interfaces due to physical limitations. In this
work, we iterate on one such interface, HAT (Head-Worn Assistive
Teleoperation), an inertial-based wearable integrated into any head-worn
garment. We evaluate HAT through a 7-day in-home study with Henry Evans, a
non-speaking individual with quadriplegia who has participated extensively in
assistive robotics studies. We additionally evaluate HAT with a proposed shared
control method for mobile manipulators termed Driver Assistance and demonstrate
how the interface generalizes to other physical devices and contexts. Our
results show that HAT is a strong teleoperation interface across key metrics
including efficiency, errors, learning curve, and workload. Code and videos are
located on our project website.
