Development of hands-free operation interface for wearable computer - Hyper Hospital at home

We have been developing a network-based care supporting system called the Hyper Hospital. The Hyper Hospital is constructed on the computer based network whose interface is the virtual reality dedicated to the patients. As a part of the progress, we have been developing a wearable computer which enables a care-givers to operate various support devices connected to the network. In the process of study, we found that hands-free operation of the wearable computer is important for the care workers to keep continuous physical care works while accessing to the computer. In this paper, we proposed a method of the hands-free interface to utilize the ocular potential generated by dipolar potential of eyeball and carried out fundamental experiments to assure a usability of this method.