A Universal Screening Tool for Dyslexia by a Web-Game and Machine Learning

Abstract

Children with dyslexia have difficulties learning how to read and write. They are often diagnosed after they fail school even if dyslexia is not related to general intelligence. Early screening of dyslexia can prevent the negative side effects of late detection and enables early intervention. In this context, we present an approach for universal screening of dyslexia using machine learning models with data gathered from a web-based language-independent game. We designed the game content taking into consideration the analysis of mistakes of people with dyslexia in different languages and other parameters related to dyslexia like auditory perception as well as visual perception. We did a user study with 313 children (116 with dyslexia) and train predictive machine learning models with the collected data. Our method yields an accuracy of 0.74 for German and 0.69 for Spanish as well as a F1-score of 0.75 for German and 0.75 for Spanish, using Random Forests and Extra Trees, respectively. We also present the game content design, potential new auditory input, and knowledge about the design approach for future research to explore Universal screening of dyslexia. universal screening with language-independent content can be used for the screening of pre-readers who do not have any language skills, facilitating a potential early intervention.

Accessible Dyslexia Detection with Real-Time Reading Feedback through Robust Interpretable Eye-Tracking Features

“…However, implementation of the scientific results in terms of eye tracking during reading, in practice, is not abundantly present. There are tools reported in the scientific literature that focus on the digitalization of dyslexia diagnosis [ 46 , 47 ], some of which do use eye tracking [ 38 ], but considering the variety of study conditions including eye trackers used, text presentation, native language, participant age, and many others, this makes practical applications somewhat complicated and difficult. Providing feedback during reading in terms of exact points in the text that caused struggles would also be quite difficult, considering that few eye-tracking processing techniques can pinpoint the locations in the text that were problematic to read.…”