Eleuto

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Inspiration

The idea for Eleuto began from a deeply personal place, one of our relatives has been suffering from Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and we've witnessed firsthand the growing difficulty they face in doing something as simple as using a phone or navigating an app. It made us ask:

“Why isn’t there a better way to control digital interfaces when your hands and voice fail you?”

That question sparked our journey into building an assistive tool that’s intuitive, accessible, and empowering not just for MS patients, but also for people with ALS, Cerebral Palsy, Parkinsonism, and Traumatic Brain Injury, where cognitive function remains intact but motor control is severely limited.

What We Learned

We spent time speaking to people affected by motor disabilities directly and through caregivers. We learned:

Most existing eye-tracking systems are expensive, require special hardware, or are too complicated.
Simpler is better: people want something predictable and reliable — not another “smart” system they have to fight with.
Even a small gesture like a blink, when mapped well, can unlock massive independence.

This gave us conviction that what we’re building is not just novel, it’s genuinely needed. We didn’t stop at the build — we actively validated our solution with users facing these challenges. Their feedback was humbling: "It was like impressive"

What we built

We built Eleuto, a cross-platform, web-based assistive technology that empowers users with severe motor disabilities — including ALS, Cerebral Palsy, Parkinsonism, TBI, and MS — to interact with digital interfaces using just eye gestures.

The core interaction is simple, intuitive, and hardware-free:

A highlight cycles through on-screen options.
When the desired option is highlighted, the user closes their eyes (blinks) to select it.
For added flexibility, Eleuto also supports dwell-based selection (hovering the gaze) and head tilt gestures for actions like scrolling or canceling.

Eleuto includes: -A grid-based control interface optimized for accessibility -Communication boards with preset phrases (e.g., “Call Mom”, “Send Help”, “Water”) -Access to real-time news and media controls — entirely hands-free

Speech synthesis and transcription for non-verbal interaction
Extensibility to mainstream use cases like cooking, gaming, or presentations

Our north star: make digital access inclusive, but also design Eleuto as a future interface usable by anyone, anywhere, without hands or voice.

How we built it

We built Eleuto as a web-based, cross-platform app that can run on any device with a webcam. It uses the following tech: Frontend:

React 18 + TypeScript
Vite (lightweight build tool for fast dev)
Tailwind CSS (for styling)
Lucide React (for intuitive, readable icons)

Backend & Services

Firebase Auth (Google OAuth support)
Netlify Functions (serverless backend logic)
RSS Feed Processing (for real-time news aggregation)
LLM/AI Integration (for natural language responses)
Speech Services (Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text for communication)

Deployment

Netlify (CI/CD + hosting)
GitHub (version control and collaboration)

Challenges we ran into

Blink detection is noisy with standard webcams — we had to tune for accuracy while avoiding false positives from casual eye movement.

Creating a universal experience that works for people with different levels of control (some can blink easily, others can't tilt) took careful consideration.