Fangmin Shi

A blueprint for integrated eye-controlled environments

Eye-based environmental control requires innovative solutions for supporting effective user interaction, for allowing home automation and control, and for making homes more “attentive” to user needs. Several approaches have already been proposed, which can be seen as isolated attempts to address partial issues and specific sub-sets of the general problem. This paper aims at tackling gaze-based home automation as a whole, exploiting state-of-the-art technologies and trying to integrate interaction modalities that are currently supported and that may be supported in the near future. User–home interaction is sought through two, complementary, interaction patterns: direct interaction and mediated interaction. Integration between home appliances and devices and user interfaces is granted by a central point of abstraction and harmonization called House Manager. Innovative points can be identified in the wide flexibility of the approach which allows on one side to integrate virtually all home devices having a communication interface, and, on the other side, combines direct and mediated user interaction exploiting the advantages of both. A discussion of interaction and accessibility issues is also provided, justifying the presented approach from the point of view of human–environment interaction.

A new gaze-based interface for environmental control

This paper describes a new control system interface which utilises the users eye gaze to enable severely disabled individuals control electronic devices easily. The system is based upon a novel human computer interface, which facilitates simple control of electronic devices by predicting and responding to the users possible intentions, based intuitively upon their point of gaze. The interface responds by automatically pre-selecting and offering only those controls appropriate to the specific device that the user looks at, in a simple and accessible manner. It therefore affords the user conscious choice of the appropriate range of control actions required, which may be executed by simple means and without the need to navigate manually through potentially complex control menus to reach them. Two systems using the head-mounted and the remote eye tracker respectively are introduced, compared and evaluated in this paper.

Eye, Me and the Environment

In order to broaden the applicability of an eye-tracking based assistive technology the available environmental control systems are reviewed. Their advantages and limitations are discussed with respect to their usage with eye tracking technology for aiding people with special needs. It is concluded that each system has its own distinct advantages for this task, linked also to their availability, ease of use and cost. Consequently a modular design approach is advocated for eye tracking control technologies in this domain to make them as generically applicable as possible.