Vision-based interface for people with serious spinal cord injury

Spinal injuries occur due to accidents, such as falling accidents and traffic accidents. In the case, serious spinal cord injury patient's physical operation abilities are mostly limited to the neck and head. In order to assist their life and offer them independent lives, environmental control system are commercialize. However, the human interface often becomes an important problem. This paper develops a vision-based human interface system for the spinal cord disabled patients. With a robust object search algorithm, this interface system 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.