10-2018 Battery-Free Eye Tracker on Glasses

This paper presents a battery-free wearable eye tracker that tracks both the 2D position and diameter of a pupil based on its light absorption property. With a few near-infrared (NIR) lights and photodiodes around the eye, NIR lights sequentially illuminate the eye from various directions while photodiodes sense spatial patterns of reflected light, which are used to infer pupil’s position and diameter on the fly via a lightweight inference algorithm. The system also exploits characteristics of different eye movement stages and adjusts its sensing and computation accordingly for further energy savings. A prototype is built with off-the-shelf hardware components and integrated into a regular pair of glasses. Experiments with 22 participants show that the system achieves 0.8-mm mean error in tracking pupil position (2.3 mm at the 95th percentile) and 0.3-mm mean error in tracking pupil diameter (0.9 mm at the 95th percentile) at 120-Hz output frame rate, consuming 395μW mean power supplied by two small, thin solar cells on glasses side arms.