MouseCage, a new software application developed by Nico Cuppen and Nick Allen from Tunic Software, helps people with hand tremor control their computer mouse.

MouseCage features a dual-cursor. The special guide cursor provides visual feedback by showing the user’s actual hand movements, while the normal Windows cursor takes an average of these movements and predicts where the user intends to click.

Another innovative feature of MouseCage is its “cage” key. When users are near their intended position for clicking, they can “cag”’ their mouse by pressing a user-defined key on their keyboard or mouse. When caging is activated, overall mouse movement is reduced to allow fine control. And if the cage key is pressed a second time, cursor movement stops altogether so that users can click in their own time.

To deal with intermittent tremor cases, a tremor-detection feature switches the computer between normal operation and MouseCage driven operation depending on the operator’s pattern of hand movements.

At present MouseCage is available for Windows 2000/XP.