A communication system for ALS patients using eye blink

Issue title: ICMIT '01

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Takeshita, Kazuhiro^{a; *} | Uchibori, Akihiko^b | Mizukami, Yoshiki^a | Satoh, Taiji^c | Tanaka, Kanya^a | Uchikado, Shigeru^d

Affiliations: [a] Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Japan | [b] Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ube National College of Technology, Japan | [c] Department of Systems Engineering, Ibaraki University, Japan | [d] Department of Information Science, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Denki University, Japan

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Tel.: +81 836 85 9432; Fax: +81 836 85 9401; E-mail: takeshita@ctrl.eee.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp

Abstract: The purpose of our research is to design a communication system for ALS patients who have difficulty in using their hands and mouth. In the proposed system, eye blink is adopted as a switch to tell judging patient's intention by using several image processing. A list of intentions is displayed on the PC monitor; each intention is displayed with an adequate time interval. The patient can select the candidate intention by blinking his/her eye. To investigate the efficiency of the proposed system, we conducted experiments on 10 subjects. The experimental results show that the proposed system distinguished conscious and unconscious eye blink.

DOI: 10.3233/JAE-2003-269

Journal: International Journal of Applied Electromagnetics and Mechanics, vol. 18, no. 1-3, pp. 3-10, 2003