Skip to main content

Monitoring Dementia with Automatic Eye Movements Analysis

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 57))

Abstract

Eye movement patterns are found to reveal human cognitive and mental states that can not be easily measured by other biological signals. With the rapid development of eye tracking technologies, there are growing interests in analysing gaze data to infer information about people’ cognitive states, tasks and activities performed in naturalistic environments. In this paper, we investigate the link between eye movements and cognitive function. We conducted experiments to record subject’s eye movements during video watching. By using computational methods, we identified eye movement features that are correlated to people’s cognitive health measures obtained through the standard cognitive tests. Our results show that it is possible to infer people’s cognitive function by analysing natural gaze behaviour. This work contributes an initial understanding of monitoring cognitive deterioration and dementia with automatic eye movement analysis.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

References

  1. Anderson, T.J., MacAskill, M.R.: Eye movements in patients with neurodegenerative disorders. Nat. Rev. Neurol. 9(2), 74–85 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bednarik, R., Vrzakova, H., Hradis, M.: What do you want to do next: a novel approach for intent prediction in gaze-based interaction. In: Procedings of ETRA 2012, ETRA ’12, pp. 83–90. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Benson, P.J., Beedie, S.A., Shephard, E., Giegling, I., Rujescu, D., Clair, D.S.: Simple viewing tests can detect eye movement abnormalities that distinguish schizophrenia cases from controls with exceptional accuracy. Biol. Psychiatry 72(9), 716–724 (2012). Cortical Inhibition Deficits in Schizophrenia

    Google Scholar 

  4. Borji, A., Itti, L.: Defending yarbus: eye movements reveal observers’ task. J. Vision 14(3(29)), 1–22 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bulling, A., Roggen, D., Trster, G.: What’s in the eyes for context-awareness? IEEE Pervasive Comput. 10(2), 48–57 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Crabb, D.P., Smith, N.D., Zhu, H.: What’s on tv? detecting age-related neurodegenerative eye disease using eye movement scanpaths. Frontiers Aging Neurosci. 6(312) (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Crawford, T.J., Higham, S., Mayes, J., Dale, M., Shaunak, S., Lekwuwa, G.: The role of working memory and attentional disengagement on inhibitory control: effects of aging and alzheimer’s disease. Age 35(5), 1637–1650 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Crawford, T.J., Higham, S., Renvoize, T., Patel, J., Dale, M., Suriya, A., Tetley, S.: Inhibitory control of saccadic eye movements and cognitive impairment in alzheimers disease. Biol. Psychiatry 57(9), 1052–1060 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Di Stasi, L.L., Renner, R., Staehr, P., Helmert, J.R., Velichkovsky, B.M., Cañas, J.J., Catena, A., Pannasch, S.: Saccadic peak velocity sensitivity to variations in mental workload. Aviat. Space Environ. Med. 81(4), 413–417 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Grober, E., Buschke, H.: Genuine memory deficits in dementia. Dev. neuropsychol. 3(1), 13–36 (1987)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., Friedman, J.: The Elements of Statistical Learning. Springer New York Inc., New York, NY, USA, Springer Series in Statistics (2001)

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Henderson, J.M., Shinkareva, S.V., Wang, J., Luke, S.G., Olejarczyk, J.: Predicting cognitive state from eye movements. PLoS ONE 8(5), e64937 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Itti, L., Koch, C.: Computational modelling of visual attention. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 2(3), 194–203 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Jang, Y.M., Lee, S., Mallipeddi, R., Kwak, H.W., Lee, M.: Recognition of human’s implicit intention based on an eyeball movement pattern analysis. In: Lu, B.L., Zhang, L., Kwok, J. (eds.) Neural Information Processing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 7062, pp. 138–145. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  15. Jimison, H., Jessey, N., McKanna, J., Zitzelberger, T., Kaye, J.: Monitoring computer interactions to detect early cognitive impairment in elders. In: 1st Transdisciplinary Conference on Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare, 2006. D2H2, pp. 75–78. IEEE (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kardan, O., Berman, M.G., Yourganov, G., Schmidt, J., Henderson, J.M.: Classifying mental states from eye movements during scene viewing (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Knapp, M., Prince, M., Albanese, E., Banerjee, S., Dhanasiri, S., Fernandez, J., Ferri, C., Snell, T., Stewart, R.: Dementia uk: report to the alzheimer’s society. Kings College London and London School of Economics and Political Science (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Nasreddine, Z.S., Phillips, N.A., Bdirian, V., Charbonneau, S., Whitehead, V., Collin, I., Cummings, J.L., Chertkow, H.: The montreal cognitive assessment, moca: a brief screening tool for mild cognitive impairment. J. Am. Geriatr. Soc. 53(4), 695–699 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Schleicher, R., Galley, N., Briest, S., Galley, L.: Blinks and saccades as indicators of fatigue in sleepiness warnings: looking tired? Ergonomics 51(7), 982–1010 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Steichen, B., Conati, C., Carenini, G.: Inferring visualization task properties, user performance, and user cognitive abilities from eye gaze data. ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst. 4(2), 11:1–11:29 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Tseng, P.H., Cameron, I., Pari, G., Reynolds, J., Munoz, D., Itti, L.: High-throughput classification of clinical populations from natural viewing eye movements. J. Neurol. 260(1), 275–284 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The work described in this paper is funded by EPSRC project EP/M006255/1 Monitoring Of Dementia using Eye Movements (MODEM).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yanxia Zhang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Zhang, Y., Wilcockson, T., Kim, K.I., Crawford, T., Gellersen, H., Sawyer, P. (2016). Monitoring Dementia with Automatic Eye Movements Analysis. In: Czarnowski, I., Caballero, A.M., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds) Intelligent Decision Technologies 2016. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 57. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39627-9_26

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39627-9_26

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39626-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39627-9

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics