A neuroscientist, Dr. Aldo Faisal, has created a budget device that can control a computer by tracking eye movement after stumbling on a £9.95 web camera sold with a games console — a huge saving on the £20,000 that a similar device used for medical research would have cost at the time.
Dr. Faisal was setting up a laboratory at Imperial College London when he made the chance discovery. He and his team reconfigured two of the cameras and fixed them to a harness that attaches to the head, creating a £43 device that enables the 6 million people in the U.K. with restricted hand movement to use computers.
The cameras communicate with the computer at which the user is looking, allowing a cursor to be moved around a screen, with a wink to click the 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.
This year, similar technology was used to produce a wheelchair that can 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.
Dr. Faisal’s lab straddles bioengineering and computing, working to unravel how the brain functions and subsequently how this knowledge can be applied to devices assisting people with restricted mobility. His discoveries could help amputees, people with paralysis, those with arthritis, and older people to be more mobile.
Cheap and widely available eye-tracking devices could be on the market within two to five years, said Dr. Faisal, who plans to commercialise his work. As the population gets older, there will be an increased need for such devices, he said.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
