Gadget that steer wheelchair with your eyes

Gadget that steer wheelchair with your eyes:

 

Put some rubbish technology with little smart s/w and you got one life innovation solution. People’s that cannot move their legs & arms will readily be able to attach a £50 gadget to their wheelchair extending with their laptop to permit them to drive around using just their eyes – without having any controls.

Peoples, who have lost the use of their body due to spinal cord injury, e.g. can usually move their eyes, for the reason that eyes are directly linked to the brain. Different technologies allow people to stare at arrows on a pc and direct the movement of a wheelchair, but there is a considerable delay b/w the movement of the eyes & the chair, & the person can't look around while manipulating the chair.

To defeat this problem, Aldo Faisal at Imperial College London and his colleagues have developed s/w that uses subtle eye movements to recognize when a person is seeing around and when they desire to move. Team member will showcase the technology at the Imperial Festival this weekend in London.

"Current eye tracking s/w doesn't allow you to look around while moving," says Faisal. "And technologies that use brainwaves to control wheelchairs aren't common because it takes many months to train a person to use them, and then you need to rally cncntrate to move – it's not natural."

Gazing intently

His team has perceived how people move their eyes when walking around and used the data to build s/w that decodes a people’s intentions. The final system includes 2 cameras – one trained on each eye – that perceive eye movements and pass that info onto a laptop, that works which direction and how far into the distance a person is looking.

But then you've get the King Midas problm, says Faisal. "Everything he tuched turned into gold, and we do not want 2 move everywhere we look."

Exactly how they resolved this problem is still beneath wraps, he said, but it involved examining subtle eye movement patterns to differentiate those relevant to locomotion from those we use when just looking around. "Our s/w can tell the difference b/w looking at someone using a coffee machine, & wanting to walk over to that coffee machine," says Faisal.

The system replied within ten milliseconds to a person's intention to displace. Typically anything under about fifteen or twenty ms feels instantaneous, said Faisal.

The team has checked it on people without physical disabilities and found that they were capable to steer through a crowd faster and with little mistakes than with current technologies that track eye movements.

Faisal says the team desire to have the system ready for sale within 3 years. If successful, it could be adapted for other purposes, like piloting a plane.

The whole system cost is about £50. "Our tech can be crap and cheap because all the smartness is in the s/w," says Faisal.