Abstract
Eye movement disorders can have various impacts on reading difficulties, such as tracking difficulties, unstable fixation, issues related to visual processing and attention. A comprehensive understanding of patient’s visual functions and reading ability may require a precise evaluation of their eye movements by vision or speech specialists. Eye tracking is a widely applied method for assessing eye movement parameters during reading and other visual tasks. By using eye tracking, it is possible to track eye movements across words and sentences without requiring any overt verbal or motor response from the child. The aim of our study was to develop an objective method for the assessing eye movement performance in children using eye-tracking technology. We tested this method on 53 s-grade school-aged children (7 and 8 years old) using special reading tasks displayed on a computer screen and eye movement recording with a Tobii Pro Fusion eye tracking device (250 Hz). Speech therapists assessed the children's reading skills using the Acadience Reading test. Our results indicated a correlation between the children's reading performance and the number of eye fixations, average fixation duration, and total reading time. Based on our results, we conclude that the developed method based on eye-tracking works well both as a screening method and as a diagnostic method for assessing eye movements during reading. This method will be particularly useful for optometrists, speech therapists, and other specialists involved in children’s vision, health, and academic achievements.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to schools participating in the study (Marupe State Gymnasium, Marupe Elementary School, Riga Cultures Secondary School, and Kuldiga Center Secondary School), as well as speech therapists J.Hanzovska, L.Meiersone, M.Vorza, I.Petuhova, S.Depa, S.Jirgensone. The study is supported by the Latvian Council of Science (project No lzp-2021/1–0219, and SIA Mikrotikls and University of Latvia Foundation (project No 2260).
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Serpa, E. et al. (2023). Assessment of Children Eye Movement Performance: An Eye-Tracker Approach. In: Dekhtyar, Y., Saknite, I. (eds) 19th Nordic-Baltic Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics. NBC 2023. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 89. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37132-5_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37132-5_31
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