A simplified approach to assist motor neuron disease patients to communicate through video oculography

Several people over the past few decades are unfortunately succumbing to the dreaded Motor Neuron Disease also known as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), the cause of which is still uncertain. Patients suffering from the same, exhibit a slow degeneration of their central nervous system which in turn affects several of their abilities such as locomotion and also speech. This paper describes a simplified setup and also elaborates a novel methodology to convert a sequence of eye winks or blinks into meaningful sentences using Video Oculography and in turn assist such patients to communicate. The algorithm discussed is not only accurate but is also 2 times faster than its predecessor algorithms. All experiments were conducted using MATLAB 2011b and SIMULINK and the setup was verified by trials conducted over 50 individuals.