Post-comatose patients with minimal consciousness tend to preserve reading comprehension skills but neglect syntax and spelling

Modern eye tracking technology provides a means for communication with patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DoC) or remaining in locked-in-state. However, being able to use an eye tracker for controlling text-based contents by such patients requires preserved reading ability in the first place. To our knowledge, this aspect, although of great social importance, so far has seemed to be neglected. In the paper, we presented the possibility of using an eye-tracking technology for assessing reading comprehension skills in post-comatose patients with minimal consciousness. We prepared various syllable-, word- and sentence-based tasks, controlled by gaze, used for assessing the reading comprehension skills. The obtained results showed that people with minimal consciousness preserved the reading comprehension skills, in most cases to a high extent, but had difficulties with recognizing errors in the written text. The ability to maintain attention during performing the tasks was in statistically significant correlation with motivation, and that one was in a statistically significant correlation with the reading ability. The results indicate that post-comatose patients with minimal consciousness can read words and sentences, hence some useful hints may be provided for the development of gaze tracking-based human-computer interfaces for these people.