Iris technology could soon help electric wheelchair users

A team led by Dr Prashant Pillai of Bradford University has demonstrated a prototype that uses an infrared camera headset to capture gaze data and feeds it to the steering motors of a wheelchair.

Commercially available electric wheelchairs generally use a armrest-mounted joystick to control speed and direction. There are models for more impaired users that employ mouth and tongue interfaces, but they are expensive and quite intrusive.  

For the current prototype, Pillai simply retrofitted one of the joystick-controlled models to receive wireless signals from a headset. The headset captures gaze data by shining infrared LEDs onto the iris and recording the reflected signals with a CCD camera device and converting the signal into something the steering motors can recognise.

‘When someone sits in it for the first time, it takes a while to train and get used to it, because most of the time we keep looking around everywhere,’ Dr Pillai told The Engineer.