An EOG-based, head-mounted eye tracker with 1 kHz sampling rate

The observation of eye movements has become a widely accepted technique in several research areas and the demand for mobile, out-of-lab eye trackers has steadily increased. Most of these head-mounted systems use videooculography (VOG) to record eye movements. VOG systems operate on low sampling rates around 30 to 60 Hz. Sampling rates this low, can hamper the undistorted analysis of the dynamic properties of eye movements. This paper presents an electrooculography (EOG) based, head-mounted eye tracker with a sampling rate of 1kHz - a temporal resolution high enough for acquisition of all eye movements and their dynamic properties (e.g. peak velocity). A compact data acquisition device stores the data and provides a real-time preview on a mobile device. The system achieves a EOG-inherent spatial resolution of 1.6 °. A wide-angle scene camera enables the recording of the participant´s field of view. The system is intended as out-of-lab eye tracker, for example in the context of an objective fitness-to-drive test for the elderly, and poses a high sampling alternative to VOG-based eye trackers.