research

The central idea that drives my current research activities is that of extending contextual awareness for wearable and pervasive computing systems by analysing movements of the human eyes. The movement patterns the eyes follow in daily routine reveal much about what people are doing - as well as what they intend to do. My objective is to investigate how information on eye motion can be used to gain knowledge about a person's activity and context.

Eye movements performed by the user while interacting with a device can provide explicit contextual information. In addition to conscious eye movements for human-computer interaction (HCI), I also investigate unconscious eye movements. Unconscious eye movements are the result of cognitive processes in the brain. These processes are related to external aspects such as the user's activity or his environment, but also to internal aspects of visual perception, memory and learning. The analysis of eye motion thus may allow to deduce these aspects which would give important input for future context-aware systems.

Besides common video-based systems, I investigate alternative measurement techniques particularly geared towards mobile eye movement recordings and novel ways of eye-based HCI. For example, electrooculography (EOG) allows for embedded and light-weight implementation using wearable sensors. Part of my work is to develop a wearable EOG device integrated into ordinary goggles that can be used for unobtrusive long-term eye movement recordings.

Context and activity recognition using eye movement analysis
Introduction and promotion of the paradigm of visual perception and eye movement analysis as new methods to implement novel and complement current context-aware systems. Therefore, I investigate the potential but also possible limitations of using eye movements to perform context and activity recognition in pervasive settings. This includes the recognition of different physical activities, location and cognitive visual tasks during short-term and long-term eye movement analysis.
Mobile attentive user interfaces and multi-modal interaction
Based on the findings from the previous objectives I investigate attentive user interfaces (AUI) in mobile settings using wearable systems. Besides cognitive aspects like visual attention and deliberate eye gestures, I analyse how subjective appraisal, temporal history and learning influence eye movement characteristics and how these aspects can be used in novel AUIs.
Wearable eye tracking based on Electrooculography
Building a wearable eye tracking solution based on Electrooculography (EOG) and try to push this technology to its limits. The key issues that get addressed are to achieve as less obtrusiveness as possible and to develop signal processing methods which adapt to dynamically changing environments during long-term recordings.