Automated Screening of Dyslexia via Dynamical Recurrence Analysis of Wearable Sensor Data

Abstract

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental learning disorder that affects the acceleration and precision of word recognition, therefore obstructing the reading fluency, as well as text comprehension. Although it is not an oculomotor disease, readers with dyslexia have shown different eye movements than typically developing subjects during text reading. The majority of existing screening techniques for dyslexia's detection employ features associated with the aberrant visual scanning of reading text seen in dyslexia, whilst ignoring completely the behavior of the underlying data generating dynamical system. To address this problem, this work proposes a novel self-tuned architecture for feature extraction by modeling directly the inherent dynamics of wearable sensor data in higher-dimensional phase spaces via multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) based on state matrices. Experimental evaluation on real data demonstrates the improved recognition accuracy of our method when compared against its state-of-the-art vector-based RQA counterparts.