New Methods of Detecting Voluntary Blinking Used to Communicate with Disabled People

In this paper two new methods of detecting a voluntary blinking and neglecting involuntary blinks are comparatively presented. This technique is used to communicate with disabled people by using the EOG acquisition system. The proposed methods are based on Hilbert transform and envelope detection of the low frequency differential EOG signals. To safely detect voluntary blinking pulses, these methods use an adaptive threshold depending on the level of the low frequency EOG signal. The prototype of the proposed system has been designed, constructed and tested for different subjects from medical care centers, hospitals and treatment units. The experiments that we made with patients have confirmed the performing operation of the proposed EOG acquisition system.