Ebiss - Eyetracking based interaction management of synchronous written communication

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Andrea Kienle
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265182156

Communication systems for supporting synchronous, written communication are established and widely used despite many alternatives such as video conferencing systems. Problems often arise while interacting, because participants can write whenever they want and also simultanously. Conventions known from oral communication and the exchange of implicit signals by the participants are only partially applicable. Those signals are missing in synchronous, written communication and new rules have to be established.One opportunity to establish the interaction management from the oral communication into synchronous, written communication is the extension of the technical system with the purpose of providing participants with the missing information and further comprehensive opportunities. The idea of this project is to design and test the use of eye-tracking as the basis of an innovative interaction management and for attracting attention in synchronous written communication. Eyetracking, the recording and analysis of eye movement and in this case the live feedback of current gaze data from communication partners, represents in this use case of synchronous communication an additional channel for the transmission of human actions to support interaction management. The evaluation and reflection of eye movement data includes communication patterns developed in linguistics. Communication patterns describe a structured communication process. The objectives of this project are therefore the analysis of interaction management characteristics in synchronous, written communication, and on this basis the development of validated design guidelines for eye-tracking based communication tools. Because of the more and more widely spread use of eye-tracking hardware, this basic research is of great interest.The applicant is a member of the DFG network Empirical research on Internet-based communication (empirikom), which discussed prior work and the idea of this project. As part of own preliminary work, the INKA-Suite as an integrated test environment that enables the eye-tracking of synchronous, written communication can be used. It offers the opportunity to design any screen interface with minimal programming effort and also provides tools for the analysis of collected data to discover communication patterns. This preliminary work has been published in refereed contributions. In addition, a laboratory with the necessary hardware is available.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Michael Beißwenger