A New Approach for Eye-Blink to Speech Conversion by Dynamic Time Warping

Motor neuron patients such as paralysis, locking syndrome, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis can see and hear what is happening in their environment, but cannot communicate with their environment. It is very important for these patients, who do not have any physical function other than eye movements, to be able to express their needs, feelings and thoughts. Therefore, to express the thoughts, needs and feelings of these patients, a system that converts eye-blink signals to speech was developed in this study. The main purpose of the designed system is high accuracy, low cost, high speed and independence from environmental factors. Undoubtedly, it is also very important that it causes as little discomfort to the patient as possible. Morse-coded signals generated by voluntary eye-blinks and the single-channel wireless NeuroSky MindWave Mobile device eliminates the need for cost-increasing equipment such as a camera or eye tracker and environmental factors such as light. With the use of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), an algorithm which works at high speed and high accuracy at the time domain and does not require any training process has been implemented. In this way, the recorded speech was performed with a quite impressive accuracy.