Innovative and interactive assistive technology controlling system using eye detection and head movements

Assistive technology refers to any device that enables people with disabilities to live, work, study or play independently and improves their functional capabilities. It offers assistance to people with a wide range of disabilities including motor, vision, hearing and speech impairments. People with severe physical disabilities can only make small movements that can be used as unconventional approaches to control assistive technologies. These movements can be converted into electrical signals and translated by a control unit into control commands.;The research being presented investigates advanced methods to enable people who are only able to make small movements to control different devices. It uses a combination of various enhanced interaction models to provide easy interface to replace the traditional control methods. This combination includes: eye gaze direction classification model and head movement detection model. The eye gaze direction classification model uses the Viola-Jones face detector and dynamic parameters in Circular Hough Transform (CHT) to locate the eye iris location. Then it uses low-level features and a classifier to categorize the eye gaze direction. The head movement detection model uses flex sensors and a PIC microcontroller to calculate the head flexion angle. An interactive device such as a tablet or smartphone can be used for the user interface. A central control unit links the assistive device with the sensors, camera and the interactive device. Such a technology has the advantage of being used by people suffering high level spinal damage.;Despite of the amount of research that has been done on finding robust alternative control and communication methods and applying them to assistive technology, it is still a challenging task which requires more investigation.