Vision-based displacement sensor for people with serious spinal cord injury

Spinal injuries occur due to accidents, such as traffic accidents, accidental falls both on the job and at home and sports accidents. In the case of serious spinal cord injury patient's physical abilities are mostly limited to the neck and head. This paper develops a vision-based interface system for these serious disabled patients with such as spinal injuries. The system consists of one web video camera and a desktop computer. In this paper a robust object search algorithm is developed. It enables accurate measurement of displacement by tracking features on the patient's face without any other sensors. The efficacy of the vision-based interface system for measuring dynamic facial movement was demonstrated through a comparison with a previously developed system to use conventional template matching algorithm.