Scientist creates budget computer eye tracker that could revolutionize mobility

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Scientist creates budget computer eye tracker that could revolutionize mobility

A scientist has created a budget device that can control a computer by tracking eye movement after stumbling on a £9.95 web camera being sold with a games console – a huge saving from the £20,000 that a similar apparatus used for medical research would have cost at the time.

German neuroscientist Dr Aldo Faisal was setting up a laboratory at Imperial College in London when he made the chance discovery.

Faisal and his team reconfigured two of the cameras and fixed them to a harness which attaches to the head, making a £43 device that opens up the use of computers to the 6 million people in the UK with restricted hand movement.
The cameras tell a computer where the user is looking, allowing a cursor to be moved around a screen while a wink enables the click of a mouse. While eye tracking had been done before, the team showed that it could be achieved at a fraction of the cost and could eventually lead to such devices being sold in shops.

Earlier this year, similar technology was used to produce a wheelchair that could be controlled using the eyes. The user can talk while the software detects where they want to go via a £120 eye-tracking bar usually employed to see if people are looking at advertisements.

The software can distinguish between when the user is looking around and when they want to move and the wheelchair responds within 10 milliseconds.

“It may not be the best hardware to do the job but we have by now such good software algorithms that can do data analytics and data processing that you put the intelligence into the software and not the hardware,” Faisal said.

“That is really the transformative thing. So a lot of biomedical engineering devices to help people [are] focused on the hardware – better sensors, better pumps – but most of the time it is how you control stuff, how you analyse the stuff that allows you to do things well.”

Faisal’s lab straddles bioengineering and computing and works to unravel how the brain functions and subsequently how this knowledge can be applied to devices assisting people with restricted mobility…..more here

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Scientist creates budget computer eye tracker that could revolutionize mobility