HK$120 webcam creates eye tracker to control computers, changing lives
Webcam costing just HK$120 is basis for eye tracker to control computer
PUBLISHED : Monday, 06 October, 2014, 9:45pm
UPDATED : Monday, 06 October, 2014, 9:45pm
The Guardian in London
Scientists are hoping that cheap and widely available eye-tracking devices could be on the market within two to five years. Photo: AFP
A British neuroscientist has created a low-budget device that can control a computer by tracking eye movement after stumbling on a £9.95 (HK$120) web camera sold with a games console. A similar device for medical research could have cost up to £20,000.
Dr Aldo 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 people with restricted hand movement to use computers.
Aldo Faisal
The cameras communicate with the computer, 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.
This year, similar technology was used to produce a wheelchair 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.
"It may not be the best hardware to do the job but we have by now such good software algorithms that can do data analytics and data processing that you put the intelligence into the software, and not the hardware," Faisal said.
"That is really the transformative thing. So a lot of biomedical engineering devices to help people [are] focused on the hardware - better sensors, better pumps - but most of the time it is how you control stuff, how you analyse the stuff that allows you to do things well."
Faisal's lab straddles bioengineering and computing, working to unravel how the brain functions and 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.
Since the control of the eye comes straight from the brain, injuries to the spinal cord or amputations do not affect eye movements, said Faisal. Parkinson's disease can affect eye movements but a device can still be controlled while multiple sclerosis also has little effect for these purposes, he says.
"The actual power of the eye-based user interfaces we build is not actually in the cheap hardware; it just shows that it works on very cheap hardware.
"What no one has done is build decoders which tell what is your intention of action based on how you look at the world and that is what we are really doing. We are building systems which, based on your eye movement behaviour, try and work out what you are going to do next."
A robot arm directed by eye movement has also been developed at the lab.
Cheap and widely available eye-tracking devices could be on the market within two to five years, according to Faisal.
