“Development of Communication Assistant Application with Blinking for Physically Handicapped Children and Elderly People” by Torii and Ohtani

Special support schools in Japan need some communication assistant tools especially for physically handicapped children. Their body movements are very limited and many of them also have mental disorders, so they cannot communicate with their families or caregivers. It prevents helpers from understanding what they really need or think. Taking the situation into consideration, we tried to develop a communication support tool operating by blinks for physically handicapped children. We used front cameras on tablets (iPad, iPad mini of Apple Inc. iOS5.0). After several verifications and examination, we have developed a contactless communication assistant application “Eye Talk” and “Eye Tell”. These applications do not malfunction by surroundings, such as brightness or differences of eye shapes. These applications detect only conscious blinks to choose letters and emit them. We have expanded this study to analyze the eye movements and acquire directions of lines of sight. If blinks and directions of lines of sight are detected precisely, we can lighten burdens of users to operate these applications. And also, this system is expected to use for a lot of fields without using expensive equipments if we can simplify and accelerate the process and improve the accuracy of determination. Front cameras of tablets usually have low sensitivity. So if we try to process pictures continuously in real time, it freezes because of the heavy data. Therefore, to increase the accuracy of processing picture data and to detect blinks without freezing are the two most important aims for this study.