Lanata Antonio, Guidi Andrea, Greco Alberto, Valenza Gaetano, Scilingo Enzo Pasquale
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2017 Jul;2017:1583-1586. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2017.8037140.
This study proposes a novel approach to measure the contractile force of eye blink that is generally obtained from the orbicularis oculi activity through Ocular ElectroMyo-Graphy (O-EMG). Here, O-EMG is compared with the eye information acquired through a wearable head-mounted eye-tracking system in order to investigate the possibility of using the eye-tracking in place of the O-EMG. Eight subjects were simultaneously monitored through an O-EMG and the eye-tracker while they were performing a structured protocol implying a variation in the blink contractile strength. Results showed that eye-tracking features were able to statistically discriminate three kinds of contractile forces similarly to EMG features. The consequent correlation analysis revealed that all the EMG-related features were significantly correlated with the eye-tracking ones with a p-value <;10. Moreover, considering the extracted eye-tracking features, i.e. Integrated Gaze Path (IGP) and Eye-closed Duration (ECD), IGP reported a higher Spearman's correlation values with eye-blink reflex magnitude (EBM) than ECD. These encouraging results suggest that the ocular information extracted from the eye-tracking could be profitably used in non-invasive ecological environments where wearability and comfortability play a crucial role in detecting spontaneous response.
本研究提出了一种测量眨眼收缩力的新方法，眨眼收缩力通常通过眼肌电图（O-EMG）从眼轮匝肌活动中获取。在此，将O-EMG与通过可穿戴式头戴式眼动追踪系统获取的眼部信息进行比较，以研究使用眼动追踪代替O-EMG的可能性。八名受试者在执行一项暗示眨眼收缩强度变化的结构化协议时，同时通过O-EMG和眼动追踪器进行监测。结果表明，眼动追踪特征能够与肌电图特征类似地在统计学上区分三种收缩力。随后的相关性分析表明，所有与肌电图相关的特征与眼动追踪特征均显著相关，p值<0.10。此外，考虑提取的眼动追踪特征，即综合注视路径（IGP）和闭眼持续时间（ECD），IGP与眨眼反射幅度（EBM）的斯皮尔曼相关性值高于ECD。这些令人鼓舞的结果表明，从眼动追踪中提取的眼部信息可有效地用于非侵入性生态环境中，在检测自发反应时，可穿戴性和舒适性起着至关重要的作用。
