Attention estimation system via smart glasses

Attention plays a critical role in effective learning. By means of attention assessment, it helps learners improve and review their learning processes, and even discover Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Hence, this work employs modified smart glasses which have an inward facing camera for eye tracking, and an inertial measurement unit for head pose estimation. The proposed attention estimation system consists of eye movement detection, head pose estimation, and machine learning. In eye movement detection, the central point of the iris is found by the locally maximum curve via the Hough transform where the region of interest is derived by the identified left and right eye corners. The head pose estimation is based on the captured inertial data to generate physical features for machine learning. Here, the machine learning adopts Genetic Algorithm (GA)-Support Vector Machine (SVM) where the feature selection of Sequential Floating Forward Selection (SFFS) is employed to determine adequate features, and GA is to optimize the parameters of SVM. Our experiments reveal that the proposed attention estimation system can achieve the accuracy of 93.1% which is fairly good as compared to the conventional systems. Therefore, the proposed system embedded in smart glasses brings users mobile, convenient, and comfortable to assess their attention on learning or medical symptom checker.