EOG acquisition system based on ATmega AVR microcontroller

Abstract

This paper presents a hardware and software of an electrooculogram (EOG) acquisition system based on ATmega AVR microcontroller for the acquisition of vertical and horizontal eye movements. The presented system is used to acquire a dataset of eye movements for volunteers. This system gives two channels representing vertical and horizontal EOG signals. The frequency range of the EOG signal is known to be 0.1 to 10 Hz, and hence this frequency range is isolated with a High-Pass Filter (HPF) with a cutoff frequency of 0.1 Hz followed by a Low-Pass Filter (LPF) with a cutoff frequency of 10 Hz. The EOG acquisition system is interfaced with an ATmega AVR microcontroller to acquire a dataset that can be used for controlling hardware such as Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), wheelchair, and robot arm. The presented system is composed of EOG signal acquisition, Ag/AgCl electrodes, analog-to-digital converter through Arduino Mega 2560 board microcontroller unit, trainer board, laptop, keypad, and Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). The eye movement is detected by measuring the potential difference between cornea and retina using five Ag–Agcl disposable electrodes. Different volunteers of different ages at different times have been treated with the presented system to obtain data. Classified vertical and horizontal EOG signals and the basic eye movements e.g., open eye, left, right, up, and down can be used to control robots and wheelchairs for rehabilitation purposes.