Absolute Eye Gaze Estimation With Biosensors in Hearing Aids.

EarEOG electrooculography eye gaze estimation head tracking hearing aids hearing-impaired inertial sensors

Journal

Frontiers in neuroscience
ISSN: 1662-4548
Titre abrégé: Front Neurosci
Pays: Switzerland
ID NLM: 101478481

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
2019
Historique:
received: 03 07 2019
accepted: 15 11 2019
entrez: 11 1 2020
pubmed: 11 1 2020
medline: 11 1 2020
Statut: epublish

Résumé

People with hearing impairment typically have difficulties following conversations in multi-talker situations. Previous studies have shown that utilizing eye gaze to steer audio through beamformers could be a solution for those situations. Recent studies have shown that in-ear electrodes that capture electrooculography in the ear (EarEOG) can estimate the eye-gaze relative to the head, when the head was fixed. The head movement can be estimated using motion sensors around the ear to create an estimate of the absolute eye-gaze in the room. In this study, an experiment was designed to mimic a multi-talker situation in order to study and model the EarEOG signal when participants attempted to follow a conversation. Eleven hearing impaired participants were presented speech from the DAT speech corpus (Bo Nielsen et al., 2014), with three targets positioned at -30°, 0° and +30° azimuth. The experiment was run in two setups: one where the participants had their head fixed in a chinrest, and the other where they were free to move their head. The participants' task was to focus their visual attention on an LED-indicated target that changed regularly. A model was developed for the relative eye-gaze estimation, taking saccades, fixations, head movement and drift from the electrode-skin half-cell into account. This model explained 90.5% of the variance of the EarEOG when the head was fixed, and 82.6% when the head was free. The absolute eye-gaze was also estimated utilizing that model. When the head was fixed, the estimation of the absolute eye-gaze was reliable. However, due to hardware issues, the estimation of the absolute eye-gaze when the head was free had a variance that was too large to reliably estimate the attended target. Overall, this study demonstrated the potential of estimating absolute eye-gaze using EarEOG and motion sensors around the ear.

Identifiants

pubmed: 31920477
doi: 10.3389/fnins.2019.01294
pmc: PMC6915090
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Pagination

1294

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2019 Favre-Félix, Graversen, Bhuiyan, Skoglund, Rotger-Griful, Rank, Dau and Lunner.

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Auteurs

Antoine Favre-Félix (A)

Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark.
Hearing Systems Section, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.

Carina Graversen (C)

Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark.

Tanveer A Bhuiyan (TA)

Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark.

Martin A Skoglund (MA)

Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark.
Division of Automatic Control, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.

Sergi Rotger-Griful (S)

Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark.

Mike Lind Rank (ML)

UNEEG Medical A/S, Lynge, Denmark.

Torsten Dau (T)

Hearing Systems Section, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.

Thomas Lunner (T)

Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark.
Hearing Systems Section, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.
Division of Automatic Control, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.

Classifications MeSH