Eye Tracking Windows 7 Tablet Developed by Students

With all the advancements in technology, people with disabilities have been getting more of a chance at actually interacting with all the new wonders of the contemporary age, and it looks like tablets just made the list.

Nowadays, though medicine is farther along than it was in recorded history, there are still many ailments and wounds that cant be treated, not perfectly at least.

Whether form birth or after diseases, or freak accidents, some people end up disabled in one or more ways.

Some particularly unfortunate disabilities involve partial or total paralysis, and it can be said that any health issue that takes away the use of one's hands are among the most grueling.

For people in this state, using a PC's mouse and keyboard, something everyday people take for granted, is impossible.

Fortunately, inventors took their plight into consideration and developed eye tracking technologies that allow them to control computers just by looking.

The downside to these solutions is that they are very expensive. Tobii PCEye, for example, goes at $6,900, while others go as high as $14,000.

A group of students from the Brigham Young University have now shown that they somehow succeeded in building a tablet with this sort of ability, though it costs only $1,500. It was created in partnership with EyeTech Digital Systems and runs Windows 7.

“They had a lot to learn about how to put together a PC, but the final result speaks for itself,” said Robert Chappell, the CEO of EyeTech.

“We’ve worked with the engineering capstones two years in a row now, and I noticed the same thing both years: the teams always come up with a lot of creative, sometimes crazy ideas at the beginning, but after three or four months they know what they need to do, and they implement it very well.”

“A lot of times in school you just work problems out of books, but this allowed us to take what we learned and apply it to something in real life, something that can help a lot of people, and that’s really helped me,” added the team's captain Jedediah Nieveen.