Remote Appliance Control using Face Gestures

This project aims at developing an interface and a pipeline to enable and facilitate appliance control for tetraplegic patients. The interface aims at minimising the extent of movement required to control appliances in order to reduce the dependence of such patients on other humans for tasks that are usually considered rudimentary. The user is needed to interact with a computer through video-feed using simple face gestures. The appliances can be accessed remotely using the internet. This project introduces an affordable, open-source and data-efficient alternative to the available options for home automation.

Usage

• To connect the Node MCU to the internet, one needs to first enter the local SSID and Password in the code and flash it onto the MCU. Once powered on, the MCU connects to the WiFi and sustains the connection unless either the MCU or the WiFi host are powered off.
• The firebase URL and API key too, are to be provided in the code before flashing it onto the MCU.
• All the connected appliances can be controlled completely, using only neck and mouth gestures.
• To change the selected device, one has to simply move their neck to the left (for previous device) and right (for next device).
• To toggle a device ON or OFF, one simply needs to open and close their mouth.
• Whenever the selected device is changed or a device’s state is updated, the terminal prompts the user and even the microcontroller sends out a serial message stating the updated state of the “state” variable stored in the firebase.

Conclusions and Future Scope

• The project succeeds at introducing a minimalistic, affordable and data-efficient system for remote control of appliances over the internet.
• The data traffic generated by the system is very low and hence there lies a great scope for introducing additional elements for automation and even surveillance while maintaining the required bandwidth at a nominal value.
• Owing to the open-source license on the project code and software, the development of the same can be accelerated via collaborative development and can be modified to run on other platforms.
• The project can be further developed into a mobile or web application which will increase accessibility and mobility, resulting in a broader spectrum of users.

The complete project report can be found here