Ocular Guided Robotized Wheelchair for Quadriplegics Users

Quadriplegia, also known as tetraplegia paralysis, entails a complete loss of limbs functions, i.e. limbs paralysis. The illness is caused by a spinal cord injury. Although people suffering from this illness lose the movement of their limbs, the illness usually does not affect the functions of their sense organs; hence, they keep the ability to move their eyes. Many systems have been designed to help such people to communicate with their environment. However, to the best of our knowledge, neither of these systems has addressed the problem of upper limbs functions compensation. Instead, most of these systems dealt with transforming the captured eye movement into commands, which are then processed and executed as computer actions such as mouse cursor movement and clicks or for wheelchair control. In our work, a system that implements eye tracking is designed to be used by people with these tetraplegia paralysis disability; in addition of detecting and interpreting the eye movement to move a wheelchair, our system allows controlling a robot which compensates some functions of the paralyzed upper members.