The aim of the paper is to develop an efficient eyeball movement tracking interface and to control the movement of wheelchair using tracking information. Locked-in syndrome is a condition in which a patient is aware of the surroundings but cannot move or communicate verbally due to complete paralysis of almost all voluntary muscles in the body except for eye movements and blinking. The individual is conscious with no loss of cognitive function and thus is able to communicate with eye movements. This condition is also known as pseudo coma. This paper gives information about how eyeball movement of LIS patients can be detected and how we can use this information to move a wheelchair in direction of the eyeball. We continuously capture the images of either the left or the right eye using a head mounted web camera. Highly accurate and fast movement in the eye region of image is detected as the eye is stationary with respect to the webcam. To control starting and stopping of wheelchair eye blinking feature is used by the algorithm as LIS patients can only move and blink their eyes. In this paper, accurate and high speed eye detection and tracking algorithm using video processing in MATLAB is proposed.

Keywords : Eyeball movement; wheelchair; PIC16F877A; MATLAB; locked-in syndrome.