A cost-effective solution for eye-gaze assistive technology

The problem of assisting people with special needs is assuming a central role in our society, and information and communication technologies are asked to have a key role in aiding people with both physical and cognitive disabilities. This paper describes an eye tracking system, whose strong points are the simplicity and the consequent affordability of costs, designed and implemented to allow people with severe motor disabilities to use gaze as an input device for selecting areas on a computer screen. The motivation for this kind of input device, together with the communication impairments that it may help to solve are reported in the paper, that then describes the adopted technical solution, compared to existing approaches, and reports the results obtained by its experimentation.