Fast Gaze Typing with an Adjustable Dwell Time

Summary:

Gaze typing, also known as eye typing, is using a gaze as input as opposed to normal keyboard use. It is primarily used for people who have severe disabilities and motor skill deficiencies. This is how it typically works:

1. The user's eyesight is tracked.
2. They keep their focus on a certain point for a certain amount of time (dwelling).
3. After the allotted time has elapsed, the gaze is considered input.

Some research has been done in the area, but the researchers behind this paper suggested that previous work was conducted by novices. The previous work used fixed dwell times and yielded undesirable results: 5 - 10 words per minute (wpm) with a dwell time of 450 - 1000 milliseconds (ms). A different study was conducted with a faster dwell time (330 ms), but still slow gaze typing (7 wpm). The last previous research mentioned was that of automatically adjusting dwell times. The results were promising, but that research suggested letting the user decide their own pace for setting dwell time. The research presented in this paper is mainly about making gaze typing faster by allowing users to adjust dwell time.

Experiment Specifics:

• They studied 11 college students who had normal vision.
• They used a QWERTY keyboard layout.
• Users could vary dwell time from 2000 ms to 150 ms.
• An animation was used to show dwell time elapsing (circle around the key).
• The activation area of the key was bigger than the actual key visualization - this was done to boost accuracy.

Each participant was studied a total of ten times each. Through these investigations, the average wpm increased from 6.9 to 19.9 and the average dwell time dropped from 876 ms to 282 ms.

Comments:

I think that the research presented took an easy idea and applied it to an interesting, novel topic. After all, don't we all know that practice makes perfect? That is basically what the paper concluded. Allow the user to learn at their own rate and the results were pretty good.