DoC Academic's work on eye driven wheelchairs featured in New Scientist.

Dr Aldo Faisal and his research team's work on eye driven wheelchairs has been featured in the New Scientist magazine.

The article explains how Aldo and his team have developed a system that will allow a disabled person to control a wheelchair with their eyes whilst distinguishing between them looking around at their surroundings or actually controlling the chair.

Several technologies exist that allow people to direct the movement of a wheelchair using their eyes but currently they can’t look around while manipulating the chair and there is a delay between the movement of the eyes and the chair.

To overcome this problem, Dr Aldo Faisal and his team  have  observed how people move their eyes when walking and used this data to build software that decodes the person's intentions, therefore  distinguishing when a person is looking around and when they want to control the movement of the wheelchair.  The finished system involves cameras trained on each eye that observes eye movements and passes that information to a laptop, which then works out which direction and how far into the distance a person is looking. The system responds within  just 10 milliseconds of a person's intention to move. Typically anything under about 15 or 20 milliseconds feels instantaneous.

The team has tested the system on people without physical disabilities and found that they were able to steer through a crowded building faster and with fewer mistakes than with current technologies.

They hope to have a system ready for sale within three years and is likely to cost as little as £50.

Read more at:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25546-cheap-gadget-lets-you-steer-a-wheelchair-with-your-eyes.html#.U3CTjleBV8H