Cognitive control of a hearing aid is the topic for several ongoing studies. The relevance of these studies should be seen in the light of inadequate steering of current hearing aids. While most studies are concerned with auditory attention tracking from the electroencephalogram (EEG), a complimentary approach may be to use visual attention tracking to steer the devices. Visual attention may be characterized by gaze direction, which can be obtained by electrooculography (EOG). EOG may be recorded from electrodes placed in the ear canal, termed EarEOG. To test the comparison of conventional EOG and EarEOG recordings, we conducted two experiments with six subjects. In the first experiment, the subjects were instructed to follow a moving dot on the screen moving in large saccades. In the second experiment, there were five large targets, and within each target, the dot had minor movements. When comparing conventional EOG and EarEOG, correlations of 0.9 and 0.91 with standard deviations of 0.02 were obtained for the two experiments respectively. To assess the feasibility of using EarEOG in real-time, correlation between EarEOG and the timecourse of the dot position was performed. When both signals were filtered with the same real-time applicable filter, correlations of 0.83 and 0.85 with standard deviations of 0.09 and 0.05 were found respectively to the two experiments. In conclusion, this study provides motivational aspects of using EarEOG to estimate eye gaze, as well as it identifies important future challenges in real-time applications to steer external devices such as a hearing aid.
[1]
L Fiedler,et al.
Ear-EEG allows extraction of neural responses in challenging listening scenarios - A future technology for hearing aids?
,
2016,
EMBC.
[2]
C. Grimbergen,et al.
Investigation into the origin of the noise of surface electrodes
,
2002,
Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing.
[3]
Roel Vertegaal,et al.
The Attentive Hearing Aid: Eye Selection of Auditory Sources for Hearing Impaired Users
,
2009,
INTERACT.
[4]
H. Puder,et al.
Hearing aids: an overview of the state-of-the-art, challenges, and future trends of an interesting audio signal processing application
,
2009,
2009 Proceedings of 6th International Symposium on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis.
[5]
John J. Foxe,et al.
Attentional Selection in a Cocktail Party Environment Can Be Decoded from Single-Trial EEG.
,
2015,
Cerebral cortex.
[6]
Tohru Yagi,et al.
Conductive rubber electrodes for earphone-based eye gesture input interface
,
2014,
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.
[7]
Masaaki Fukumoto,et al.
Full-time wearable headphone-type gaze detector
,
2006,
CHI Extended Abstracts.