Eye -Tracking technology has evolved over the last few years to provide significant humanization benefits. Eye -Tracking means different things to different applications. A solid base premise is needed to understand.
The Digital Team in the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Technology Transformation Service, provides a good point of analysis.
As the name connotes, the technology drives in on the webpage’s views for eye measuring and analyzing the focus, and movement. There is a surveillance component of the technology that is embedded in the hardware/software interface.
The Technology contains eye tracking software that captures the site visitors’ visual reactions to each metric point in the content. The tech deploys heat maps to determine the concentration points of the content gaze. Most eye-tracking tech solutions compliment the heat map feature with the facility to capture and analyze the short latency reflex of the eye movement that are navigated by precise pathways from the retina to the primary cortical region of the brain.
This technology arms Content Developers with the information needed to sharpen the message and the way the content is presented and delivered. As the technology evolves through generational development, it is within acceptable prognostications, that Eye-Tracking tech solutions will replace surveys as a more accurate barometers of consumer trends, preferences and needs.
However, the applicability of the tech presents opportunities to expand the applications to MedTech and health care applications. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a diverse group of conditions. Characteristics of autism may be detected in early childhood, but autism is often not diagnosed until much later. One(child) in 160 (globally has ASD)”
The Yale School of Medicine has a good site to study the advances of diagnosing and treating ASD, “ According to the site, the key to early intervention is diagnosing autism as early as possible”, https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/early-detection-autism.
Can the mass availability of eye-tracking technology help parents and guardians identify concerns to medial professionals from the confines of their home to assist in the process of early detection?
In a recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Duke University Study documented the following conclusion,” Atypical eye gaze is an early-emerging symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and holds promise for autism screening. Current eye-tracking methods are expensive and require special equipment and calibration. There is a need for scalable, feasible methods for measuring eye gaze.”
There are several studies that are using eye tracking technology to measure Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and the onset of Alzheimer.
EdTech Entrepreneurs are using this technology to create tech products that will aide students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
The Eye-Tracking tech solutions are very promising. The ability to provide direct tech-based solutions to address health and education issues is quite pronounced. The potential to develop solutions to agriculture demands of seed testing, seed sampling and crop yield is an extremely valuable solution, as smart agriculture is needed to maintain food supply lines in the Asian and Africa. However, this technology needs further development to lower the cost of its applications.
The challenge of the cost and the inevitable Return on the Investment issues was met head on by an exciting Startup from Seoul. Visual Camp is an exciting tech company that is coming out of the vibrant Seoul Startup Ecosystem.
A review of its website reveals important “highlight notes” that every Startup Entrepreneur should adopt in its “CONCEPT GENERATION STAGE”.
The Founders of Visual Camp place the Market Stress Point in the tech solutions marketplace front and center, https://visual.camp/eye-tracking-control/.
The site has a CHALLENGE PAGE. On the Challenge Page, the Founders lay out the confounding problems of deploying the Eye-Tracking Technology. CHALLENGES TO SOLVE grabs your attention while viewing the site. Every Startup needs to direct its Concept Generators to this key factor. The Founder sum up the challenges in five brilliant bullets points.
- Depends on Hardware
- Cost is very high
- Device and supporting OS is limited
- Algorithm is heavy to run in mobile device
- Calibration process is too long
SOLUTION, once again if you are a young entrepreneur sitting in a coffee café, scratching out a Concept Generation Sheet for your Startup, follow this sleek and yet laser sharp example. The solution lays out the case for the viability of the Startup offering. The opening solution statement claims. “lightweight algorithm to run from devices we use every day. You no longer need hardware and can use the camera you already have”
Assuming the efficacy of the Visual Camp technology the consumer value is self-evident. Physicians can examine data from mobile phone in the comfort of the patient’s home. Consumer goods can be marketed in a more diverse and cost-effective manner. Education product and service lines can be developed around this cost-effective technology.
As with all advances, there are legal and ethical issues that must be addressed. The capture of the eye movements and the resulting analysis is data. The issue of ownership over that data and viewers privacy rights will need to be reconciled.
US based ACLU has identified the data privacy issues surrounding the data harvesting that the tech facilitates. As the use of the Tech develops, Privacy advocates and lawyers will be raising these concerns.
Will solid Privacy Practices of the tech owners be sufficient? Will Regulations be implemented around data derived from the technology?
Considering the value offering of the technology and the ability to lower the cost and increase the deployment of its applications, these issues will be resolved.
