Medical Device for Communication with Neuromotor Disabled Patients

In some circumstances, with the aid of assistive technologies, patients having neuromotor disabilities can interact with virtual keyboards by triggering virtual switches or moving a cursor on a screen to select desired items. This paper presents an electronic medical device used in eye tracking systems that helps the neuromotor disabled patients to communicate with the clinicians through a device connected to a computer. The proposed device contains a custom designed electronic module used to acquire the electrooculography signals, an Arduino Leonardo microprocessor board for the signal acquisition and processing, and a PC running a software in form of a visual keyboard. Due to their affections, the neuromotor disabled patients can't speak or write, but present cognitive function and manifest their intentions by moving their eyeballs. The application running an Arduino detects the patients' actions by moving the eyeballs in four directions and selects a key from a virtual keyboard by using dwell time selection method. The proposed medical device has been implemented and tested on simulated patients and the performances in terms accuracy of the desired key selection have been presented.