Assistive communication system for speech disabled patients based on electro-oculogram character recognition

Smart technology provides an important alternative for the assistance of speech disabled individuals like spinal cord injury patients. Out of all biological signals, electro-oculogram promises to be the most appropriate residual ability which could be extracted to generate different characters for daily life communication. The precise change of corneo-retinal potential based on intension to speak/ write the words due to the change in orientation of the eye ball could be sensed and processed in real time to generate speech signals or messages to communicate. The electro-oculography (EOG) sensor and amplifier unit were designed to capture the eyeballs movement and resulted signals were processed to display messages. This paper illustrates the novel instrumentation; signal processing and data mining approaches for design of EOG based assistive devices. Described methods could be further extended for flight navigation, development of virtual reality systems and several other military clinical applications.