LUKE MARSH, QUADRIPLEGIC STUDENT, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY:
Good girl.

LEWIN:
Luke is a quadriplegic.

MARCH:
I was injured in a ATV accident. I hit a cable strung across the road. That was almost three and a half years now. Everything from my shoulders down is affected with paralysis.

LEWIN:
But Luke does keep busy using his computer.

MARCH: I spend a lot of time on the computer. Usually surfing the Web, homework, e-mail.

LEWIN: After the accident, Luke got a computer that recognized his voice. But now he has a much more sophisticated system that allows him to click or type with his eyes, simply by staring at the screen.

MARCH:
It's much faster. It's a lot closer to the speed of using just a regular mouse.

LEWIN:
Luke's eyes, in effect, are the mouse on his computer. This is how it works. He wears a headset that looks like a pair of high-tech sunglasses. It has miniature cameras that track his eye movement, his gaze, as he looks at a computer monitor.

Jim Richardson (ph) invented the device.

JIM RICHARDSON, INVENTOR OF EYE ON COMPUTER SYSTEM:
It just has two cameras in it, one that looks at your eye and then one that looks at the screen. And there's a little processor that takes both of these images, combines them together, and then extracts from that the relevant information.

LEWIN:
And then the data go into the computer. The basic technology was developed by the military back in the '70s. Since then, a system using a larger camera mounted on a monitor has been available for $23,000. Richardson's costs $2,500, and since the cameras are in the headset, the user can move his head without being strapped in. When you click on something by eye, you get audio confirmation. It can also be used with a voice synthesizer.

COMPUTER VOICE SYNTHESIZER:
Hello, Mr. Richardson, welcome.

LEWIN:
Richardson was prompted to develop this computer after a cousin of his was in an accident and lost the use of his limbs as well as his ability to speak. The cousin can only use his eyes. So Richardson refined the old military concept and miniaturized it.

RICHARDSON:
When I say to you that we have two cameras in this headset, you know, some people would think that it was this rather large, ugly-looking device. In reality, it weighs a little over two ounces. I know glasses that weigh that much. And that allows us to really have a price breakthrough and a usability breakthrough at the same time.

LEWIN:
Richardson says more than a million Americans with disabilities could potentially benefit from the device. In addition to paraplegics, they include many of the two million Americans with Lou Gehrig's disease, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and muscular dystrophy.

Ron Hagy (ph) is an advocate for the disabled.

RON HAGY, ADVOCATE FOR DISABLED:
The quicker we can use the mouse and the computer, the faster and more efficiently we can do our job. You can't turn me down if I can do the work just as quick as somebody else on a computer.
To be able to sit there by yourself and be independent again, now this is what we're hoping to reach through all of this, is independence. We want people to be able to sit down at a computer and not have to worry about calling on somebody else every ten minutes to readjust and reconfigure.

LEWIN:
Meanwhile, Richardson is setting his gaze on a future market for Eye On. He thinks everyone from office workers to cashiers at McDonald's could become more productive by using this technology.

For NPR News, I'm Jacob Lewin in Corvallis, Oregon.