Affordable Design Realization for Ultrasound Based Non-Contact Eye Blink Event Detection

Abstract

This paper reports a novel ultrasound technique for detecting eye-blinks from a distance. Most commonly available non-contact eye blink detection techniques are based on video detection. However, video camera based detection technique depends heavily on background illumination and are resource starving in nature. In this work, we primarily focus on ultrasound phase measurement technique to come up with an affordable yet sensitive system to detect eye blink events from a distance. In fact, the solution is built using readily available off-the shelve 40 kHz air-couple transducers, a 555 timer IC, a multiplier chip along with a few standard op-amps. The developed solution can find application where measurements are taken in control environments such as Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) projects to remove eye-blinks from Electroencephalography (EEG) signals.