Architecture for touch free communication system for patients suffering from ALS

This paper proposes a simple and useful architecture for a touch free system for communication for patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) making use of the facial feature detection by statistical modeling to obtain the eye brow raise by adopting the Active Shape Modeling (ASM). The ASM feature points are programmed such that they generate a system interrupt at every eye brow raise. The model of the system consists of a user interface with a control that highlights each of the pre defined options for a short period of time on a screen, attached with a camera. This interface is placed in front of the patient. The user selects the option of his choice by raising his eye brow when the required task is highlighted. This way he/she can trigger emergency alarms, ask for help, command the robotic arm, drive the wheel chair et cetera. Eliminating the dependence on hardware has been the main motive of the project, so that it can be made available for a larger user community. The complete architecture for the system is described and the working principles of the Active Shape Modeling are lightly explained in the paper.