VOA常速英语2014--科学家为残疾人开发眼睛追踪轮椅（在线收听）

Scientists Develop Eyetracking Wheelchair for Severely Disabled 科学家为残疾人开发眼睛追踪轮椅

WASHINGTON —

Scientists in London are working to develop a wheelchair that can be maneuvered simply by looking in the direction in which the user wishes to travel. If the project succeeds, relatively inexpensive software could be used to provide better mobility to paralyzed people and people without arms.

Most people suffering from multiple sclerosis or spinal cord injuries can still move their eyes because they are directly connected to the brain. Some existing technologies already allow severely disabled people to stare at arrows on a computer and direct the movement of a wheelchair.  But there are problems with that system, including a delay between the movement of the eyes and the wheelchair.

大多数患有硬化症或脊髓受伤者都仍然能转动眼睛，这是因为眼睛直接和大脑相连接。现有的科技已经能让严重残疾者盯着电脑上的光标，然后指挥轮椅的运动。但是这一系统存在问题，包括眼睛和轮椅运动之间存在延迟。

"Current tracking software often uses a screen-based system where you have a screen open and you look at locations on the screen. The problem with that is that it's very simplistic and also diverts the users' attention from the outside world and therefore there's more risk of not noticing obstacles or other things in the way," said Kirubin Pillay, a PhD student at Imperial College London.

Kirubin Pillay是伦敦帝国学院的博士生，“目前的追踪软件通常使用基于屏幕的系统，让屏幕打开，人盯着屏幕上的位置看。这个系统的问题是太过简单，让使用者的注意力从外部击中在屏幕上，这样更容易忽略路上的障碍等东西。”

A team led by Aldo Faisal at Imperial College London has developed software that allows users to maneuver the chair just by looking in the direction they want to take.

伦敦帝国学院Aldo Faisal领导的团队开发了一个软件，让使用者只需看着希望去的方向就能操纵轮椅。

"Our eyes are not only a window into our soul, they're also a window to our intentions. So if you want to go somewhere, for example if I want to go there, or go there, I will look there and I will look there in a specific manner, and we can build a computer system that can decode our eye movements, and so we observe eye movements with an eye tracker, and we then try to make sense of them, and the computer interprets these commands and drives the wheelchair accordingly,” said Fasial.

“我们的眼睛不仅是灵魂的窗户，也是我们意图的窗口。所以如果你想去哪个地方，比如我想去那里，我就看着那里，我以某种特殊的方式看着那里，我们能建立一个能解码眼睛运动的计算机系统，所以我们用眼睛追踪仪观察眼睛的移动，我们能试着理解其意思，电脑就解释这一指令，然后驱动轮椅运动。”

Two cameras trained on the eyes observe their movements and can determine whether a patient is merely looking around or wants to move in a certain direction. 

两个摄像头观察眼睛的运动，判断病人只是在张望还是想去某个方向。

"So essentially we track the pupil of the eye and via a calibration process, we relate that to where the subject's looking in the world around them," explained William Abbott, a researcher at Imperial College London. 

威廉·阿伯特是伦敦帝国学院的一名研究员，“基本上说我们追踪眼睛的瞳孔，然后通过一个测量过程，我们将瞳孔与患者在周围寻找的地方相关联。”

Visual information detected by cameras is analyzed by algorithms within 10 milliseconds and translated into instructions for movement that's almost instantaneous.

摄像机检测到的视觉信息在百万分之一秒内被算法分析，然后即时转化为运动指令。

The camera-based system costs only about $85 because most of the work is done by the algorithms. No expensive hardware is needed.  The London team hopes to make the system commercially available within three years.

这个基于摄像机的系统价值大约85美元，因为大部分工作是由算法来完成的，无需昂贵的硬件。这支伦敦团队希望在三年内让该系统实现商业化。