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Abstract. An often-heard complaint about hearing aids is that their amplification of environmental noise makes it difficult for users to focus on one particular speaker. In this paper, we present a new prototype Attentive Hearing Aid (AHA) based on ViewPointer, a wearable calibration-free eye tracker. With AHA, users need only look at the person they are listening to, to amplify that voice in their hearing aid. We present a preliminary evaluation of the use of eye input by hearing impaired users for switching between simultaneous speakers. We compared eye input with manual source selection through pointing and remote control buttons. Results show eye input was 73% faster than selection by pointing and 58% faster than button selection. In terms of recall of the material presented, eye input performed 80% better than traditional hearing aids, 54% better than buttons, and 37% better than pointing. Participants rated eye input as highest in the "easiest", "most natural", and "best overall" categories.

We present ECSGlasses: eye contact sensing glasses that report when people look at their wearer. When eye contact is detected, the glasses stream this information to appliances to inform these about the wearer's engagement. We present one example of such an appliance, eyeBlog, a conversational video blogging system. The system uses eye contact information to decide when to record video from the glasses' camera.

eyeBlog is an automatic personal video recording and publishing system. It consists of ECSGlasses [1], which are a pair of glasses augmented with a wireless eye contact and glyph sensing camera, and a web application that visualizes the video from the ECSGlasses camera as chronologically delineated blog entries. The blog format allows for easy annotation, grading, cataloging and searching of video segments by the wearer or anyone else with internet access. eyeBlog reduces the editing effort of video bloggers by recording video only when something of interest is registered by the camera. Interest is determined by a combination of independent methods. For example, recording can automatically be triggered upon detection of eye contact towards the wearer of the glasses, allowing all face-to-face interactions to be recorded. Recording can also be triggered by the detection of image patterns such as glyphs in the frame of the camera. This allows the wearer to record their interactions with any object that has an associated unique marker. Finally, by pressing a button the user can manually initiate recording.

One of the problems with notification appliances is that they can be distracting when providing information not of immediate interest to the user. In this paper, we present AuraOrb, an ambient notification appliance that deploys progressive turn taking techniques to minimize notification disruptions. AuraOrb uses eye contact sensing to detect user interest in an initially ambient light notification. Once detected, it displays a text message with a notification heading visible from 360 degrees. Touching the orb causes the associated message to be displayed on the user's computer screen.We performed an initial evaluation of AuraOrb's functionality using a set of heuristics tailored to ambient displays. Results of our evaluation suggest that progressive turn taking techniques allowed AuraOrb users to access notification headings with minimal impact on their focus task.