Microsoft develops GazeSpeak, new application for people with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis)

[OyaYansa]

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's disease, a former New York Yankees baseball player who in 1939 had to withdraw because of this disease and in France as the Charcot's disease, is a degenerative disease of the neuromuscular type that causes progressive muscular paralysis. In advanced cases the patients of ALS the only form of communication they have is through sight, that is why Microsoft Research developed an application called GazeSpeak that aims to enable people suffering from ALS to communicate with others through the Movement of your eyes.

The application is executed on the smartphone of the person with whom the patient tries to communicate. Aiming the camera of the smartphone as if they were capturing a photograph. The smartphone in turn has a sticker on the back that shows a grid with letters grouped in four boxes, one to the left, others to the right and the remaining up and down respectively. As the patient looks at the pictures with the letters, GazeSpeak uses computer vision to capture the movement of the eyes and thus identify the letters to which it points.

One of the developers of GazeSpeak, Xiaoyi Zhang, explains how the application works as follows:

For example, to say the word "task" the patient first looks down to select the group containing the letter "t", then look up to select the group containing the letter "a" and so on with the rest.
Of course, at this point you will wonder how the application knows that the letter in the box below is the "t" and the letter in the upper box is the letter "a", other developers, Meredith Morris, explains that the application Uses artificial intelligence to predict words.

In tests carried out to determine the effectiveness of GazeSpeak, it showed an average of 78 seconds to complete a sentence that by current methods takes 123 seconds. In one of the tests a person arrived managed to "write" a sentence in 62 seconds and said that this could probably improve when used in the real world.

In May, Microsoft will present the application at the Conference on Human Factors and Computer Systems in Colorado, United States, but according to the Redmond company will be available earlier in the Apple application store and those who want to collaborate to improve it or Adapt it will be able to do it since it is open source and the code will be available in totally free form.