For children with severe cerebral palsy or a variety of head or high spinal injuries, communication through normal means or with existing technology is virtually impossible. Many of these children have normal intelligence but cannot speak or make other reliable overt movements. Without the movement control necessary to communicate, they may be institutionalized as retarded or uneducable. Just as these individuals continuously require specialized computer based communication aids to meet the needs of their chronic deficiencies, so there exists a larger population of people who may require temporary communication assistance during recovery from acute debilitating illness such as stroke, trauma, or toxemia. We have observed that many of these individuals retain the ability to move their eyes although they are unable to reliably make other voluntary movements. We have capitalized on this observation to develop a microcomputer based device - The EyeTracker - that allows these people to communicate using gaze control. Although eye movement-based control may be essential for the communication needs of themost severely physically handicapped, it can be the method of choice for those having less severe motor impairments. This is because eye movement control is much more rapid and less fatiguing than other body movements.
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