A communication system for ALS patients using eye-direction

The purpose of our research is to design a communication system for ALS patients, who have difficulty in using their hands and mouth. In the proposed system, eye-direction is adopted for judging patients´ intention. Patients´ eye-direction is detected, without attaching special devices on patients, by capturing their face image with CCD camera and applying on image processing technique to the obtained image. Based on the detected eye-direction, the area in the screen, which corresponds to the patients´ intention, is identified. We experimented on 4 subjects to confirm the utility of the proposed system. In this experiment, average success rates of system were over 90%.