A smart eye mask that tracks muscle movements to tell what 'caught your
eye'

Date:
August 20, 2020
Source:
Cell Press
Summary:
Integrating first-of-its-kind washable hydrogel electrodes with
a pulse sensor, researchers have developed smart eyewear to track
eye movement and cardiac data for physiological and psychological
studies. The eyewear provides accurate measurements in an everyday
environment without compromising users' comfort.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Integrating first-of-its-kind washable hydrogel electrodes with a pulse
sensor, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have
developed smart eyewear to track eye movement and cardiac data for physiological and psychological studies. The eyewear -- known as Chesma
and presented August 20 in the journal Matter -- provides accurate
measurements in an everyday environment without compromising users'
comfort.


==========================================================================
"Our mask can track people's eye movement as they're shown images,
so you can start to understand what they're paying attention to, for
how long, whether they keep finding other places to look," says senior
author Trisha L. Andrew of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Current technology for eye movement tracking relies on electrooculography (EOG), a technique designed over 50 years ago to measure the eye's
electrical potential changes. "The problem is that you have to stick
those adhesive electrodes on your face," says Andrew. "But people tend
to be a little finicky about stuff put on their face, unsurprisingly."
One challenge in designing smart wearables is developing products that
provide both accuracy and comfort. To achieve that, Andrew and her
colleagues developed a novel hydrogel electrode by growing polymers
on fabrics. Reaching the nooks and cranny of the fiber pattern, the
hydrogel polymer bonds to and covers the fabric's topology, resulting in a mechanically stable coating that is imperceptible to one's eye and touch.

The team then combined these hydrogel electrodes with a pulse sensor
to create an eye mask that can track eye movements and collect cardiac
signals from the artery located at the brow bone. "Our team was able
to really address that core problem to create a garment that you would
be willing to wear and give you clinically accurate results when you use
it," says Andrew. The research team, composed of Iranian, Indian American, Armenian-Greek, and Chinese American scientists named the eyewear Chesma,
a word meaning eyeglasses or eyes in many of their languages.

One clinical use of the mask might be to monitor sleep. "One of the
biggest classifiers between sleep stages is how radically you move your
eyes," says Andrew. "We could correlate some of these sleep stages and
also start to understand whether you have sleep disorder problems or
if you have some underlying heart rate issues." Besides performing as
well as the adhesive clinical electrodes currently in use, the hydrogel electrodes used in Chesma are also extremely durable. The hydrogel can
resist long-term build-up from makeup, pollution, and skin waste that may
fault the electrodes, as well as withstand 15 laundry cycles. And the researchers found that Chesma's signal did not display any degradation
after 6 hours of continuous use without rehydrating the hydrogel,
suggesting that it could be worn for long periods of time. In fact,
the hydrogel retains water so well that it takes almost 40 hours to dry
out completely -- and even if it does, Andrew says simply "a couple of
drops of water on it, let it sit for about 30 seconds, and it becomes
like gelatin once more." Next, the research team wants to reduce the
power demand of the device, which would allow users to charge the device
once every three nights instead of every 8 hours. The extended battery
life can also facilitate potential applications during people's waking
hours. Besides its potential uses in health monitoring, the team would
also like to see it deployed in other fields such as virtual reality
and gaming or performance analysis, where it could help researchers
understand if an ad literally "caught people's eye." This work was
supported by the National Science Foundation and the David and Lucile
Packard Foundation.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Cell_Press. Note: Content may be
edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. S. Zohreh Homayounfar, Soha Rostaminia, Ali Kiaghadi, Xingda Chen,
Emerson T. Alexander, Deepak Ganesan, Trisha L. Andrew. Multimodal
Smart Eyewear for Longitudinal Eye Movement Tracking. Matter,
2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2020.07.030 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200820110916.htm

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