Eye Strokes: An Eye-gaze Drawing System for Mandarin Characters

Abstract

Studies showed that 61% of the elderly in Singapore are English illiterate, and it is essential to find alternatives for non-English literate patients who have literacy in the next most common language, Mandarin. Many eye typing solutions use Mandarin hanyu pinyin, a phonetic system similar to eye typing in the English language. However, most Mandarin-speaking elderly in Singapore are not familiar with Mandarin hanyu pinyin despite being able to read and write Mandarin characters, which makes eye typing redundant. We propose Eye Strokes, a technique to capture eye gaze, as an input modality to identify Mandarin characters for motor neurone disease patients to communicate. This method uses the eye gaze as strokes in a Mandarin character to predict and identify the Mandarin word the user intends to communicate. The proof-of-ideation evaluation discussed in the paper shows that our technique is feasible with promising character prediction accuracy for further investigations, although some limitations exist.