Attention Sensitive Web Browsing

The attention level is an important indicator of the user's level of interest while viewing any content. The web browser is one of the most popular means to access information, and the usage of browsers in mobile devices is increasing. In this paper we analyze the use of attention as an input for web browsers. Attention can be measured easily in real time using cheap commercially available wearable EEG sensors, such as NeuroSky's MindWave. We use the measured level of attention in the following ways: as an input mechanism for navigating through the controls on the web browser such as buttons, menus and hyperlinks, to correlate the attention with the section of the webpage being browsed and make the web browser responsive to the user's attention level in real time, and as an input that is fed back to the web server enabling the web content developer to make attention sensitive websites. For each of these, we provide the implementation details and some results obtained. We also provide some pointers how the input attention level event obtained from the EEG sensors can be standardized in the W3C specification.