Demo: iBlink: Smart Glasses for Facial Paralysis Patients

Facial paralysis is a disease caused by nerve damage, which can make patients lose facial movements. Facial paralysis patients usually have muscles on one side of the face noticeably droop, which seriously impacts the person's quality of life as shown in Fig. [skull]. Worse still, the eye on the affected side is unable to blink and will become dry and infected by debries, which can incur eye damage even blindness. To the best of scientists' knowledge, the paralysis is due to the pressure incurred by infection in the tunnel containing main trunk of facial nerves, where the tunnel is inside of the people's head termed as the Facial canal. In this demo, we present iBlink [1], a novel system to help paralysis patients to blink. Paralysis usually occurs in just one side of the face, and clinical trials show that electrical stimulation could trigger blink. Based on such observations, the basic idea of iBlink is to monitor the normal side of the face with a camera and stimulate the paralysed side, so that eye-movements of the both sides become symmetric.