A wheelchair controlled by eye movements

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:  A group of city-based engineering students has developed a new entrant to the category of motorised wheelchairs. Termed as ‘eye-tracked wheelchair’, the system will enable the user to control the movement of the chair in tune with his eye movements. The wheelchair has been developed by Rahul R, Nithin G, Midhun Chandran M R and Vysakh Venugopal, final year Electronics and Communication Engineering students of Sree Chitra Thirunal College of Engineering here as part of their final semester project.The battery-driven electric wheelchair includes a motor-based driving mechanism and a microcontroller-based processing unit with wireless data transfer facility. The wheelchair will have a wireless camera fitted into it. The camera will catch the eyeball movements of the user and send them to the processing unit set up in a laptop or PC as images. The images are iterated against a set of trained images stored inside the database of the processing unit and by means of highly sophisticated optimisation techniques, the image is processed to collect the required data.With the help of a program called MATLAB, the computer detects the eyeball movements of the user. The computer will then send commands to the wheelchair control board.Depending on which command it receives, the wheelchair will move in the corresponding direction. It can also move in any direction and has a sensor which gives it the capability to avoid hitting the objects in the path. The commands will be sent using Zig Bee protocol, the higher end of Bluetooth used for data transmission.The students say that their innovation is open to much wider possibilities. "What we have developed is a minor version of the eye- tracked wheelchair. We have used a low power motor in the chair for propulsion and a laptop for transmission and processing of signals. To be used widely, we would need a well-sophisticated processing unit and a highly powered motor. It would need more money and expert research assistance,’’ says Midhun.They call the wheelchair a ‘Stand alone image processing engine’.The microcontroller used in the system is a kind of mini-computer which is embedded within the system to process the images. The signals sent by the microcontroller are used to activate the motors in the chair which propel it ahead. The system uses basic face recognition algorithm which is commonly used in various industrial establishments.It took these students three months and cost them nearly Rs 20,000 to complete the project.Although they were circumspect about the outcome at the beginning of the project, the boys are now waiting for some expert hands to help them develop the system into a socially feasible device."We know that this can be made into something really big. We would like to have the right guidance and some funds to lead us,’’ says Midhun.