iBlink: A Wearable Device Facilitating Facial Paralysis Patients to Blink

摘要

Facial paralysis makes patients lose their facial movements, which can incur eye damage even blindness since patients are incapable of blinking. We design and implement a pair of smart glasses iBlink to assist facial paralysis patients to blink. The basic idea is to monitor the normal side of the face with a camera and stimulate the paralyzed side, so that the blink of the both eyes become symmetric. Our contributions are: First, we propose an eye-blink detection mechanism based on support vector machine (SVM), which can detect asymmetric blinks of patients under various illumination conditions with an accuracy above 99 percent. Our eye-image library for training the model is published online for further related studies, which contains more than 30,000 eye images. Second, we design and implement an automatic stimulation circuits to generate electrical impulse for stimulating the patient's facial nerve branches, which can configure operational parameters in a self-adaptive manner for different patients. Third, we implement the entire iBlink system, which integrates the two functions above and a communication function module for tele-medicine applications. We conduct experiments in a hospital to obtain the design basis and verify effectiveness of our device.