Eye controlled robotic arm offers independence to physically disabled

“There’s no right pace,” said Mohamed Kante, E’12, who worked with elderly and dis­abled patients at Kin­dred Tran­si­tional Care and and Reha­bil­i­ta­tion — Craw­ford in Fall River, Mass. No matter how fast or slow he and his col­leagues offered patients bites of food, they could never match the patients’ indi­vidual needs.

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The eye Con­trolled Robotic Arm Feeding Tech­nology, or iCRAFT, has the poten­tial “to give thou­sands of par­a­lyzed indi­vid­uals the inde­pen­dence to eat with min­imal help from a care­giver,” Meleis said.

Sim­ilar tech­nolo­gies exist, including the recently reported Brain­Gate implant, which allows patients to con­trol a robotic arm merely by thinking about it. But these  require some kind of inva­sive — or even sur­gical — inter­face to con­nect the user’s desires with the robot’s behav­iors, Lopes said.

In this case, there is no phys­ical con­nec­tion between the user and the con­trol device — no joy­stick under their chin, for example. Instead, the patient needs only to look at a box on a com­puter screen.

The team devel­oped an eye-​​tracking soft­ware that cou­ples the direc­tion of a patient’s pupils with his or her food choices. Three col­ored seg­ments of the screen cor­re­spond to two bowls of food and a drinking bottle. A fourth, larger seg­ment allows the patient to take a break from eating.

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“The single best moment of this cap­stone expe­ri­ence was the first time we were actu­ally able to con­trol the robot arm with nothing but our eyes,” Barron noted. “Once we were able to accom­plish this feat, I was con­fi­dent that every­thing else would fall into place.”

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Watch the following video to see this robot in action:

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Photo credit: northeastern.edu