An EMG-based wearable multifunctional Eye-control glass to control home appliances and communicate by voluntary blinks

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to first apply the electromyogram (EMG) of corrugator supercilii muscles as the only signal to control home appliances and communicate with others by means of voluntary blinks, especially for the severely disabled. An EMG-based wearable eye-control glass is constructed as a multifunctional human–machine interface (HMI) device in this work. Twelve healthy subjects participated in the experiment to perform the home appliance eye-control task and the eye-communication task. This multifunctional eye-control glass is low-cost, easy-to-use, and wearable, and the experiment results indicate the high selectivity of voluntary blinks/natural blinks and left-eye blinks/right-eye blinks, excellent sensitivity, fast response time, high accuracy, low individual differences, and a prominent information transfer rate of the wearable device. This study provides a novel way for the construction of wearable eye-control devices to help healthy and disabled people conveniently control home appliances and communicate with the external world. It is gentler for users when applying this EMG-based wearable eye-control glass in various practical applications, like in the cinema or a meeting, than gesture and voice interactions. For disabled people without speaking ability, users can perform simple communication and express their needs with clinical staff with the help of this wearable device. Especially, this novel method greatly facilitates the daily lives of patients in the lock-in state through blink control. Moreover, the relationship between voluntary blinks and the movement of corrugator supercilii muscles is proven.