Communicating when a traumatic brain injury, stroke, or disease has made speech impossible can be intimidating. Specialized eye-tracking technology uses eye movement to enable people living with disabilities to connect one-on-one over the phone or via the internet.

Eye-tracking systems for computers pinpoint a person’s gaze – where the eye is looking at a screen – by reflecting infrared light off the cornea and capturing it with a camera, using image-processing software to determine the eye’s orientation. The technology isn’t new, but it has become much more widely accessible, thanks in part to a collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory