Technology moves so fast these days – blink and you’ll miss it. But two separate teams of researchers at British universities are building intricate systems that could allow disabled people to control their wheelchairs with their eyes. We speak to both centres and asks what the future holds for eye tracking technology…

As video games go, it’s pretty basic. A thin white bar at the bottom of the computer screen jerkily shifts across to collide with a tiny white dot that keeps falling towards it.

Like a clunky mix of arcade classics Breakout and Pong, it’s not exactly Earth-shattering. But in this case, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This primitive game isn’t controlled by a joypad or a keyboard, but the eyes.
Using a pair of glasses that monitor the pupils and feed information back to computers, the wearer can control the white bar simply by looking at the part of the screen where they want it to go.

The glasses – created by researchers at Imperial College London – also allow users to navigate their way round a computer without a mouse.
Dr Aldo Faisal, lecturer in neurotechnology at the college, said the idea came from a ‘crazy side project that actually worked’.

Now his team plans to incorporate the idea into a device that allows people who cannot use their limbs to control their wheelchair in the blink of an eye.
If they want to move somewhere, all they have to do is look in that direction.
‘The user interface traces out the path and if that’s the path you want to drive, you would simply wink twice with your left or right eyes and the wheelchair will start driving,’ explained Dr Faisal.

‘If you want the wheelchair to stop you wink again. We measure the movements of your eyes.’ He said the device, which would be slotted into existing electric wheelchairs, could be on the market within three years.

‘With the wheelchair, it will be trickier so we want to have safeguards,’ said Dr Faisal. ‘If an attractive woman walks past, you don’t want your wheelchair to follow your gaze. We want the wheelchair to be smarter.’

The goal is to keep the cost of the technology for the consumer as low as possible, potentially under £300. Existing eye tracking systems for computers are currently on the market for thousands of pounds.

Dr Faisal believes the wheelchair technology could help more than five million Britons suffering from conditions such as arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis and spinal cord injury.

However, Imperial College isn’t the only university working on an eye-controlled wheelchair. Researchers at Bradford University already have a prototype in place and have taken the idea one step further: users do not have to wear glasses to control the wheelchair.

After initially testing a wheelchair controlled by a camera-mounted headset, Dr Prashant Pillai, lecturer in electronics engineering, decided to put the cameras on the chair instead.

He said: ‘We don’t want the disabled to wear headgear, it doesn’t make sense.

‘What we want to do is remote eye tracking so the cameras are on the wheelchair itself and the patient can just look exactly where they want.’ Testing is under way on the remote technology and the university is seeking funding which could help put it on the market by the end of 2013.

It is hoped a final commercial version – which could be retrofitted to an electric wheelchair – would cost less than £500.

‘I think there is still some scope of improvement,’ said Dr Pillai.

‘We can very clearly track the eye movement and control the wheelchair, but what we are now trying to do is make it a little bit easier to use and easy to calibrate.’

Swedish company Tobii Technology specialises in eye tracking and about 400 people in Britain use its eye-controlled computers.

Its devices strobe infrared lights on to the user’s eyeball and capture them using infrared cameras, tracking the person’s eye movement.

The company believes this type of technology will become widespread in the future, although it isn’t fully convinced the market is ready for an eye-controlled wheelchair. ‘We love the idea,’ said Hector Minto, Tobii’s sales manager for assistive technology in the UK. ‘But we’ve looked into it and we’re unsure of the health and safety issues at the moment.’

THiNK Eye Tracking, in Reading, Berkshire, provides insight to retailers and marketers on how its products are viewed by consumers.

Its director, Robert Stevens, said an eye-controlled wheelchair is ‘awesome, life-changing technology’, but he doesn’t expect it to spread to everyday use any time soon.

‘Your mouse is much more accurate than your eye,’ he said. ‘The eye is always trembling – it’s innately inaccurate.’

For more information on the university’s work please access their website at http://faisallab.com/

By Ross McGuinness
metro.co.uk, 6/12/2011