An Assistive VLC Technology for Smart Home Devices Using EOG

In recent years, assistive technology has been an emerging area of research to improve the quality of life, especially for the disabled and elderly people. In this paper, a novel electro-oculogram (EOG) signal based assistive visible light communication (VLC) in a smart home environment is presented. The eye movement is captured using silver chloride (AgCl) surface electrodes placed around eyes. The captured signal is further processed and transmitted using a VLC link to control smart home devices. To validate the proposed EOG-VLC based smart device control scheme, experiments were conducted. For the ease of the experiments, instead of an actual smart home device, we employed a digital door lock to verify its accurate control operation. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed smart device control scheme operates accurately and reliably. Therefore, since the proposed scheme is based on a less hazardous VLC link, it is envisioned that the scheme can pave the way for greener and safer smart homes, particularly benefiting disabled and elderly people.