Eye tracking is a versatile technology with applications across various fields for its ability to provide detailed insights into visual attention and behavior. With more and more organizations gaining interest in this technology’s abilities, there has been a rise in numerous offline and online eye-tracking tools such as METRIC. User experience (UX) and web design, marketing and advertising, cognitive research, human-computer interaction (HCI), and even automotive and aviation industries, where eye tracking is used for driver monitoring and pilot training, are just a few sectors in which this impactful technology plays a big role. These, however, are only the more popular uses of eye tracking, but what about medicine and diagnosis?
Medical and clinical research benefits from eye tracking in studying neurological and developmental disorders. Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU) Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI) has advanced Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research with the development of Arabic stimuli, spotlighting social attention as a key developmental parameter. The study, Unleashing research potential to extend ASD diagnostic tools beyond Qatar to the broader Arabic-speaking world, has introduced an Arabic version of the Autism Risk Index (ARI), leveraging eye-tracking technology for early screening and diagnosis of ASD. The researchers translated and created eye-tracking stimuli tests of the ARI into Arabic, validating them on a sample of 144 children with ASD and 96 controls, which included 84 non-autistic children and 12 children with developmental delays. The ARI demonstrated reliability, effectively differentiating children with ASD from the control groups, and showed a robust correlation with parent-reported ASD symptoms, highlighting its cross-cultural validity.
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Dr. Fouad Alshaban and his team at QBRI’s Neurological Disorders Research Center adapted the methodology from previous studies at Cleveland Clinic USA, creating Arabic stimuli to elicit responses similar to those observed in original studies. The ARI aggregates gaze metrics to form an autism risk index, showcasing potential in identifying ASD across diverse populations. While the study supports the ARI’s validity in Qatar, further cross-cultural validation studies are needed. Future research will focus on clinical testing, comparing the ARI’s accuracy to established tools like the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2nd edition (ADOS-2), and formulating guidelines for its use in clinical settings. Dr. Alshaban emphasized the importance of these efforts for more effective ASD diagnostic methodologies across cultures.
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Azem, J. Y., Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., and Jansen, B. J. (2023) Measuring Engagement Through Remote Interactions of Customers: Introducing METRIC, 2023 International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC), Doha, Qatar, 2023, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1109/ISNCC58260.2023.10323669.
Salminen, J., Jansen, B. J., An, J., Jung, S.G., Nielsen, L., and Kwak, H. (2018) Fixation and Confusion – Investigating Eye-tracking Participants’ Exposure to Information in Personas. ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR2018), New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, 11-15 March.
Salminen, J., Nielsen, L., An, J., Jung, S.G., Kwak, H., and Jansen, B. J. (2018) Is More Better?: Impact of Multiple Photos on Perception of Persona Profiles. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2018), Montréal, Canada, 21-26 April, Paper No. 317.