The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Crescent Engineering students win honours at national meet

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 25, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Crescent Engineering students win honours at national meet

Staff Reporter

Project to help severely paralysed patients wins the jury's nod

Students Vijay Ramnath, R. Christopher and G. Anil of B. S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Engineering College.

TAMBARAM: For a physically challenged person, travelling around in a wheelchair for long periods of time can not only be painful, but also pose several problems. It could be even worse if the patient is acutely paralysed. And three electrical and electronics engineering students have suggested that the movement of the eyeball could help in guiding the movement of the wheelchair.

Third-year students of B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Engineering College, Vandalur, — Vijay Ramnath, R. Christopher and G. Anil — received top honours in a paper presentation contest at Cognizance '06, a national annual inter-college meet held at Indian Institute of Technogy, Roorkee, last month. Their paper titled, "Electrooculogram Based Telemetry Instrumentation (ET System) and its applications for severely paralysed patients," won the jury's nod.

Their project was among the hundreds the organisers in Roorkee received. In the end, they were among the 12 finalists and emerged as clear winners, ahead of the hosts and University of IT, Delhi.

On what prompted them to think of working on such a project, the students said the urge to work on a different project that could be workable after proper research was always at the back of their minds. And they did not want to work on irrelevant topics or on some other issue they would soon forget. Hence, they zeroed in Telemetry, the science of wireless transmission of signals, and they worked on digital signal processing. The signals generated by eye track movement of the severely paralysed patients could be used to activate the patient support system.

According to them, with careful acquisition, additional processing and precise modelling, the EOG signals can offer a viable replacement and offer a great amount of help to the severely paralysed patients.

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