The Eye Tribe

Fifteen competing senior design teams from EECS displayed their posters in the halls of the department on April 24th. The judging was administered by five industry representatives specializing in areas such as: microelectronics, power systems, electrical engineering and software development. The winning team, Team Gleason, was chosen based on their poster, their project as a whole, and their presentation.

Team Gleason has been developing a reliable predictive-typing software program which runs on a generic Android or Windows-8 tablet; and uses two hardware platforms for eye tracking: The Eye Tribe and The Pupil.

Former WSU football star9 and New Orleans Saints special teams cult hero10 Steve Gleason11 has ALS12, a debilitating and cruel disease that strips its victims of the ability to control their muscles and kills them in 2-5 years. However, until the very end patients can control their eyes and eyelids. This is the primary way they communicate – by moving their eyes whereby a tablet computer tracks their eyes – after their voice goes.

The equipment for this is crude, e.g. it does not do much predictive typing like any smart phone does when it guesses the rest of your word. It is also very expensive, $4K to start with a barebones system and often way more (Steve’s system costs $20K). Even $4K is far beyond what Medicare will cover and what many victims of ALS can afford to pay themselves, so sadly they simply can’t communicate effectively once their voice is gone. Tragically, the patients’ minds are still perfectly good; they are basically trapped incommunicado.

WSU’s “World Class, Face to Face” students and faculty will develop inexpensive technology and release it under open source license with no royalties in order to disrupt this unacceptable status quo for ALS patients.

“I can crank out about 20 words per minute,” Gleason wrote in SportsIllustrated.com. “For 4,500 words, that’s almost four hours to finish this column.” This slow typing rate makes it difficult for ALS patients to actively participate in conversations even with the text-to-speech software.

As part of their senior design project, the students are combating that issue by programming eye-tracking software that is predictive. Like a smartphone’s auto-complete function, it anticipates a word or phrase based on a couple of letters. Currently, the students are putting the software on PUPIL, a 3-D printed set of glasses that connects to a computer to translate eye movement into computer action. The program will be open source with no royalties, making it freely available to the public.