EOG BASED HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM FOR PHYSICALLY DISABLED PERSONS

Kale S.D.
swadip.06@gmail

Chougule S.K.
csushantk@gmail

Chapolikar J.D.
vaibhav_chapolikar@yahoo

Disale A.H.
disaleamol@gmail

Abstract- This paper describes the use of Electrooculogram (EOG) signal to improve the life quality physically disabled persons. EOG is an electrophysiological signal. Electric potentials are generated across Cornea and Retina of the eyes as a result of eyeball movements. This type of signal is referred as Cornea-Retina Potential (CRP) and it is the source of EOG. A portable wireless eye movement controlled system can be designed to control the home appliances without any physical movement. Such system consists of surface electrodes, biopotential amplifier, wireless module and microcontroller with ADC module. EOG signal has frequency range of between DC and 40Hz. Appropriate selection of LPF and HPF in biopotential amplifier captures the required signal. Occurrence of DC drifts and numerous artifacts along with power line interferences are the major challenges while designing the Biopotential amplifier. The paper describes the design of biopoential amplifier to reduce these interferences. System captures the distinct signal for different eye movements and these signals are used to control the remote home appliances. Keywords Electrooculogram, Cornea Retina Potential, biopotential amplifier, ZigBee module, signal processing, HCI.

III.ELECTROOCULOGRPHY
Electrooculography is the technique of using electrodes to measure the electrical potential generated by the motion of the eye. Presented system is designed based on this type of signal. Different properties are explored in this paper and application of EOG is explained.

A.EOG SIGNAL
Eye physiology shows that in the human eye, there is receptor layer (fovea) to which lense system focuses light. When light comes to this layer, the nervous system transmits the signal to the visual cortex in the brain. In eye movements, a potential across cornea and retina exists. As stated above, this potential is called as Cornea Retina Potential (CRP), which is caused by hyper polarization and depolarization. Cornea is the positive side and source of EOG. Fig.1 shows the cross section of human eye. The EOG signal has frequency range between DC and 40Hz. Amplitude of the signal is 10 to 100mV.

I.INTRODUCTION
Electrophysiological signals play important role in biomedical engineering to extract electric data from patients body. Such kind of electric data is interfered by signals generated inside the human body and outside world noise signals. In this paper we have described the electronic signal conditioning method to faithfully detect one of the biomedical signals, Electrooculogram (EOG). EOG is one of the electrophysiological signals. We have designed and successfully implemented the EOG detection system. At present, we are working on EOG based wireless system to control home appliances. It is specially designed for physically disabled persons to operate various electronic devices merely by eye movement. Also the use of EOG to diagnose different eye defects is explored in this paper. Electrophysiological signals are electrical phenomena related to a physiological event, such as a heart beat or muscular contraction. These signals can be divided into voluntary and involuntary. Depending on the signal or event of interest, there are several types of measurements which may be taken. Some of these types are the Electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG), Electroencephalogram (EEG), Electromyogram (EMG), and Electrooculogram (EOG). Researchers have employed electrophysiological signals in an effort to enhance, augment or regain subsystems of the body. Others have attempted to replicate natural electrophysiological subsystem inputs. In terms of our primary senses, the eye is one of the main subsystems of the body. The position of the eye directly relates with the visual information of interest.

Fig.1 Eye physiology

B.EOG MEASUREMENT
Figure illustrates the EOG measurement as a result of eye movement and Figure 2 shows Electrodes x+ and x - measure the horizontal, and y+ and y- measure the vertical movement. Common electrode arrangement for the EOG. The EOG can be used to record eye movements up to 70 with a typical accuracy of 1.5 to 2.0. The EOG provides an advantage over other measurements of eye movement because head and body movements do not hinder recording. Typical applications of the EOG include the measure of saccadic eye movements, smooth pursuit eye movements, nystagmus and blinking.

C.FREQUENCY RESPONSE

electrodes placed around eyes. After a biopotential amplifier, the EOG signals converted to 10-bit digital signal using PIC18F microcontroller and then sent to a coordinator node which is connected with a laptop or a micro-processor through ZigBee wireless communication technology. The software on the laptop or micro-processor recognizes the direction of eye movement and voluntary eye blinking. Programs (typewriter, patient assistant software, etc.) in laptop or remote devices (TV, lamps, telephone, etc.) can be controlled by the recognized results.
A.SURFACE ELECTRODES The acquisition system employs Ag - AgCl surface electrodes for signal pickup which requires application of sufficient electrolyte gel to reduce the skin impedance. Ag AgCl electrodes are used for ECG detection also. Low cost, easy availability, no physical hazard are features of these electrodes. B.BIOPOTENTIAL AMPLIFIER The major problem associated with the conventional design of EOG biopotential amplifier is the continued presence of unpredictable DC drifts that tend to saturate the amplifier stages, even after high pass filtering. This in turn renders the signal processing applications based on the conventional design of biopotential amplifiers unreliable. The characteristics of both the DC drift suppression scheme used in such systems (with a cutoff of approximately 0.1 Hz). It is clearly noticeable that a sizeable amount of distortion is introduced between 1 Hz and 5 Hz in the conventional design of the EOG biopotential amplifier which makes the whole system non-linear. The other demerit of using mere high pass filtering is that it does not eliminate the DC drifts completely and they tend to occur quite frequently in the acquired EOG signal. In the next section, we shall observe how the novel EOG biopotential amplifier overcomes these two challenges. The electrical interference from the surroundings of the system are always present and the interference induced on the body common to the biopotential sensing electrodes is called the common mode interference and its frequency is 50 Hz in India. This power-line interference is suppressed conventionally by the use of low pass filters of high orders, with a cutoff frequency of 40 Hz. Instrumentation amplifier and band pass filter are designed by simple Op-Amp ICs (eg.741)

FIG. 2 FREQUENCY RESPONSE

As shown in fig, EOG signal is having very low frequency component. DC drift, power line interference are main issues to be considered. Linear EOG signal can be obtained at 1Hz to 40Hz.

III. SYSTEM OVERVIEW

Following diagram shows the basic building blocks of EOG based wireless home appliance control system.

Fig.2 System overview

The system we have developed consists of four major parts: (1) three surface electrodes, (2) a biopotential amplifier, (3) a laptop (or a microprocessor), and (4) a ZigBee wireless module. Fig. _ is the schematic diagram of this system and the whole system adopts the star topology which is also used in. In this system, horizontal a EOG signals are measured by three surface

Store digital data in buffer. Initialize serial communication module with appropriate baud rate and frame format. Receiver interrupt is enabled. Serial data is transmitted to remote computer using zigbee wireless module. If data is received following ISR is executed, o o Store received data in buffer. Put the data on output port. This data is used to drive different applications such as wheelchair, relays etc. Return to main code after resetting the interrupt.

C. Wireless module

Fig.3 Biopotential amplifier

The Wireless module takes responsibility for transmitting biopotential EOG signals from one node attached to the users body to the coordinator node connected with the laptop. Meanwhile, the coordinator can send messages to other remote controllers (TV, lamp, telephone, etc). The ZigBee wireless communication technology, which is proved to be reliable, low-power and cost-efficient, is used in this system. Compared with the popular Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies, ZigBee has a wider range of communication and supports more nodes. Most importantly, the power consumption of ZigBee is very low. Therefore, ZigBee is perfectly suitable in terms of data rate for the wireless transmission of physiological vital signs or even continuous monitoring

B. SIGNAL PROCESSING Acquired data is to be monitored in remote computer. The remote computer consists of Matlab software to continuously monitor and process the data. Matlab is collection of different toolboxes, assigned to perform different tasks. Data acquisition toolbox and signal processing toolbox is used in our project. Following tasks are performed in Matlab,

Receive serial data transmitted from remote patient node. 10 bit hex data is converted into decimal form. Depending on reference voltage used for ADC convert data in corresponding voltage levels. Store the data in buffer. Plot the Real time graph of EOG signal. Analyze the data and detect the information in EOG signal. Responsive action is taken in near-real time. To perform these tasks following algorithm is implemented in respective toolbox. Data acquisition toolbox: 1. 2. 3. Create a MATLAB object that represents serial port. Configure serial port object for desired Baud rate and frame structure. Start data acquisition by opening the serial port object.

IV. SOFTWARE DESIGN

As EOG signal is not a very reliable source of information, software design becomes more critical. There are two main parts of the software design in this project. First part concentrates on acquisition of analog EOG signal, conversion to digital form and serial transmission of data. These tasks are executed by microcontroller. Second part of software is written in Matlab. This part constitutes of data monitoring, signal processing and decision taking algorithm. A.DATA ACQUISITION Microcontroller executes data acquisition part of the software design. Assembly language is chosen for coding as it provides complete control over hardware under time critical situation. Following algorithm is implemented, Initialize ADC module in controller. Set appropriate acquisition time delay. Start analog to digital conversion. Wait for conversion to complete.

4. 5.

Read the data on serial port specifying the number of bits to be acquired. To write data, specify the data precision, mode of transmission (sync/async).

Fig.5 EOG detector output on DSO

Signal processing toolbox: 1. Store the digital EOG signal in 2x1 matrix, as the data is of 10 bits. 2. 3. 4. 5. Convert hex data into decimal form first and to voltage level depending on reference voltage. Plot the data in real time graph for each sample. Plot FFT of signal to study frequency characteristic. Analyze the data and take appropriate decision to drive the application at remote end.

Such distinct signals can be used to control the different electronic applications. Wireless transmission of signal allows physically disabled persons to operate home appliances without any physical movement. We are currently working on wireless transmission of EOG signal without loosing its original characteristics. Signal detection and its conversion to digital form is successfully implemented. Real time graph plotted in matlab as shown below,

C. REAL TIME DECISION MAKING As the system is developed specially for handicap person response time is bound to be very less. Though it is not possible to implement actual real time system, near-real time system is possible. Information in EOG signal is not very reliable and we need to analyze buffered data before taking any action. Data captured in matlab is in the form is samples. To analyze the data accurately decision making algorithm is executed after every 20 samples. This method gives delay of less than one second.
Fig. 6 Real time graph in matlab

database Last 20 samples buffer Decision making algorithm

Time required to execute code in microcontroller is less than 10 ms. Wireless transmission of data gives delay in few milliseconds. Matlab responds to captured data in real time. Hence, we have successfully plotted real time graph in matlab. After plotting the graph matlab code analyze the data and sends appropriate commands to remote microcontroller. Microcontroller receives data and drives the application connected to it. We have successfully implemented the system to drive the wheelchair for physically. Also home appliances are controlled using relay drive circuit. The basic and important success of the project is, we have implemented a low cost controller based system which can acquire and process data in real time. By changing bio potential amplifier, system to detect different biomedical signals can be easily implemented.

COM port

Serial module

Fig. 4 Signal processing

V. RESULT AND DISCUSSION

Biopotential amplifier to detect the noiseless EOG signal is successfully implemented. Acquired signal is distinct for different eye movements. Following fig. shows EOG signal for left and right eye movement.

VI.FUTURE SCOPE
EOG signal is emerging as an alternative Human Computer Interface (HCI). Using different signal processing tools, signal can be analyzed. Software to operate mouse, game control can be written to use EOG signal as a computer interface. EOG can be used as powerful tool to operate computer for normal persons also, when hands are busy in some other work.

As system can be made compatible with different biomedical signals, a part of project can be used to monitor and process the EEG signal. Brain controlled wheelchair can be implemented.

3.J.H.Nagle ,Biopotential Amplifiers, the biomedical engineering handbook Bronzino J.D. Boca Raton (FL), CRC Press, pp. 1185 ,1195, 1995. 4. Rangaraj M. Rangayyan, Biomedical Signal Analysis: A Case Study Approach, John Wiley and Sons Inc., First Edition, 2001. 5.Xiaoxiang Zheng, Xin Li, Jun Liu, Weidong Chen, Yaoyao Hao, A portable wireless eye movement-controlled HumanComputer interface for the Disabled: 6. S. H. Kwon and H. C. Kim*,EOG-BASED GLASSES-TYPE
WIRELES MOUSE FOR DISABLE

Fig. 7 EEG monitoring system

VII. CONCLUSION
Paper covered the eye physiology and generation of EOG signal. Different techniques to track eye movement are overviewed. Problems in implementing EOG detector are discussed and practical solution to overcome the same are provided. Hardware and software design are discussed in detail. At the end, different applications implemented and future scope of project is discussed.

REFERENCES
1.IEEE paper Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury,S.Venkataramanan,Harshal B.Nemade,J.S.Sahambi, Design and Development of a Novel EOG Biopotential Amplifier,2005 2. Toral Zaveri, Jason Winters, Mamta Wankhede, A fast and accurate method for discriminating five choices with EOG