Preliminary testing of eye gaze interfaces for controlling a haptic system intended to support play in children with physical impairments: Attentive versus explicit interfaces

INTRODUCTION: Children with physical impairments may face challenges to play because of their motor impairments, which could lead to negative impacts in their development. The objective of this article was to compare two eye gaze interfaces that identified the desired toy a user wanted to reach with a haptic-enabled telerobotic system in a play activity. METHODS: One of the interfaces was an attentive user interface predicted the toy that children wanted to reach by observing where they incidentally focused their gaze. The other was an explicit eye input interface determined the toy after the child dwelled for 500 ms on a selection point. Five typically developing children, an adult with cerebral palsy (CP) and a child with CP participated in this study. They controlled the robotic system to play a whack-a-mole game. RESULTS: The prediction accuracy of the attentive interface was higher than 89% in average, for all participants. All participants did the activity faster with the attentive interface than with the explicit interface. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the attentive interface was faster and easier to use, especially for children. Children needed constant prompting and were not 100% successful at using the explicit interface.