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Now, a motorized-wheelchair guided by eye-movement

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This year Mission Mumbai has incorporated a social cause, Smile Mumbai, for which engineering students of Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) are making an eye-controlled wheelchair, developed under Technovanza, an annual techno-managerial festival, which will be held from Dec 28 to 30 this year.

According to the students, this wheelchair would be very useful for people who are quadriplegic who use wheelchairs with joystick, but have to depend on others.

VJTI students have developed a low-cost mobility solution for quadriplegics by building a motorized-wheelchair that can be guided by eye-movement. They have achieved this by exploiting the fact that the cornea (front) of the human-eye differs in electric potential from the back of the eye. This potential difference can be measured by using sensitive electrodes and highly accurate instrumentation amplifiers.

The students who are part of this research are Abhinendra Singh, a third year electronics and telecommunication student, Dhiraj Patil, Anson Bastos, Melroy Tellis, Abhishek Suryawanshi, all third year electronics engineering students. They started their research on eye-controlled wheelchair during their second year of engineering.

The wheelchair prototype will be presented at the techno-managerial festival.

These students visited several NGOs to find out what kind of wheelchairs quadriplegic are using. They found a person living in Goregaon using a joystick wheelchair, but he had to rely on someone.

The technique of measuring variations is called 'electrooculography' and the signal so obtained is called 'electrooculogram (EOG), which is mainly applied in detecting eye movement. The motion of eyeballs in a specific direction yields a specific EOG pattern, which can be detected and used to move a wheelchair in the same direction. It has been experimentally ascertained that this potential difference is independent of ambient lighting conditions. Hence this technique can be utilized at night just as reliably as during daytime.

Dhiraj Patil said: "Conventional eye-controlled wheelchairs rely on photography and image-processing to detect eye movements. This is slow and error-prone, and also requires expensive processing hardware. Our technique does not have these drawbacks, and it enables detection of eye movements faster and more accurately. We are trying to make the product cost-effective. After we finish our model we will give it to the person in Goregaon to check if it works for him. We are also going to introduce some features in the wheelchair that can control switches of fan, light, television, etc through voice command."

Abhinendra Singh of VJTI said: "We plan to include safeguards such as automatic obstacle-and-inclination detector, so that there is no risk of accidental collision or of hurtling down steep slopes such as staircases. If we have adequate funding, we could build a wheelchair which incorporates all that is possible through this technique."

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