Automatic eye gesture recognition in audiometries for patients with cognitive decline

Abstract

This paper provides a specifically adapted methodology for supporting the audiologists when testing the hearing of patients with cognitive decline or other communication disabilities. These patients can not interact with the audiologist conventionally, but they often express gestural reactions when they perceive the auditory stimuli typically associated to the eyes region. From a video sequence captured during the hearing evaluation, we analyze the movements in the area of the patient's eyes, so we can detect these gestural reactions. We define a set of different gestures for classification, based on the expert knowledge. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of the 90.65% when classifying these movements, showing their separability, and therefore, the possibility of interpreting them with high-level information as positive reactions to the auditory stimuli. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.