Project: DIY Hands-free Computer Interface for Under $200
The motivation
I created this because I had been releasing various Instructables in the past and just enjoyed sharing. But also for some reason there wasn't an article that went over the combination of an eyetracker with an EMG for a hands-free interface, even though it's a reasonably accurate, easy to use, and affordable solution.
It may not look like much, but hey it’s cheap and more importantly it does work
I used this interface to type in a url using an on-screen keyboard, and then navigated around the website. But overall, it worked alright. The downside was mostly the poor sensitivity of the EMG, which required I really use the muscles for it to register, using a slightly better EMG or any binary sensor alternative would’ve allowed for a relatively smooth experience.
I imagined this project could be useful for someone out there to replicate or as a foundation to build off of, for instance one could easily replace the EMG with a button on the arduino and then use most of the same parts and code to have a working alternative. It may be someone who wants to use it to create a clickable foot pedal or it may be a quadriplegic who can’t afford the actual solution. Either way, the information wasn’t available before but it is now! 🙂
The future
What's interesting is that in the near future, it'll be possible to replace this interface with an Eyetracker+EEG setup.
Imagine a high-quality eyetracker such as this one from Pupil Labs (which is open-source) paired with a high-quality EEG such as this one from OpenBCI (which is also open-source). Where the data from the EEG is processed through a fast fourier transformation, and then read through a deep learning network, which only distinguishes a click intent. Easier said than done, but at the very least, the data to train the neural net would be easy to acquire.
Truly exciting times to be alive.