Remote Eye-Tracking for Cognitive Telerehabilitation and Interactive School Tasks in Times of COVID-19

Abstract

In the attempt to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 lockdown, most countries have recently authorized and promoted the adoption of e-learning and remote teaching technologies, often with the support of teleconferencing platforms. Unfortunately, not all students can benefit from the adoption of such a surrogate of their usual school. We were asked to devise a way to allow a community of children affected by the Rett genetic syndrome, and thus unable to communicate verbally, in writing or by gestures, to actively participate in remote rehabilitation and special education sessions by exploiting eye-gaze tracking. As not all subjects can access commercial eye-tracking devices, we investigated new ways to facilitate the access to eye gaze-based interaction for this specific case. The adopted communication platform is a videoconferencing software, so all we had at our disposal was a live video stream of the child. As a solution to the problem, we developed a software (named SWYG) that only runs at the “operator” side of the communication, at the side of the videoconferencing software, and does not require to install other software in the child’s computer. The preliminary results obtained are very promising and the software is ready to be deployed on a larger base. While this paper is being written, several children are finally able to communicate with their caregivers from home, without relying on expensive and cumbersome devices.

Social and Cognitive Interactions Through an Interactive School Service for RTT Patients at the COVID-19 Time

“…In accordance with previous studies (Aruanno et al, 2018 ; Damianidou et al, 2018 ; Iannizzotto et al, 2020 ) we suggest that more accessible online education tools should be designed to consider a wider range of concerns, such as feature of the syndrome, age and online environment. Moreover, the lack of specific interaction technologies, such as eye tracking may sometimes hinder the effectiveness and the availability of the proposed approach, as such technologies may be unavailable in specific cases (entry-level or mobile computing platforms).…”

Learning with technology during emergencies: A systematic review of K‐12 education

“…It is not surprising that promoting student learning and engagement was the area most often researched, as this is the utmost priority in learning. There were a variety of strategies to promote student learning and engagement, such as incorporating physical activity (Yarımkaya & Esentürk, 2020), virtual nagging (Semingson et al., 2020), providing intervention sessions for behavioural goals of special education students (Frederick et al., 2020), providing phone‐based assessments (Angrist et al., 2020), cultivating and maintaining relationships with students (Combs, 2020), creating new or modified learning activities using materials students had at home (Anderson & Hira, 2020), and using eye‐tracking software with special education students (Iannizzotto et al., 2020).…”

The Role of a Virtual Avatar in Attention and Memory Tasks in Rett Syndrome

“…We consider the ndings reported in this article a relevant contribution to the introduction of a new generation of embodied interactive virtual agents (interactive avatars) aimed at supporting subjects with RTT in their everyday activities 49,50 . These ndings can help families and educators to identify what sort of software can be effectively used to help subjects with RTT, and also software designers to make good evidence-based choices to offer more focused software, capable of giving signi cant performance improvements [51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] .…”