Assessing Visual Engagement for Visuomotor Skills Rehabilitation Training in Infants

Simple visual stimuli, with bright colours and dynamically evolving over time, are among the most effective mechanisms through which to engage a baby´s attention. In earlier work, we have developed a visual stimulating tool to aid rehabilitation programs, which can be used with infants of up to 2 years of age. The feedback from the early use of the device has been rather positive. Yet, until now, there was no explicit way to assess the degree of engagement of the infant’s attention, or even when the focus of said attention moved away from the stimulus. Hence, it has been difficult to understand whether the proposed specific rehabilitation procedure has failed, for a given infant, or the loss of attention led to a decrease in efficiency in the intervention. In the current work we develop and exploit a simple eye tracking tool, based on a laptop’s own webcam, to evaluate the child’s loss of attention to visual stimuli. The main differentiating criterion, set forth for this eyetracker, is that it should work without an explicit calibration stage. The use of the specific camera is motivated with the fact that the laptop can be used for visual stimuli deliver, as well as a series of data processing steps. The results attained thus far were rather encouraging, leading even to a subsequent study, replacing infants by adults undergoing a rehabilitation program, after suffering from brain stroke.