Devices able to log everything you read will soon go mainstream, letting you see for yourself whether your reading habits need revamping

What’s catching your eye? (Image: Ashok Sinha/Getty)

ADDICTED to the Mail Online’s infamous celebrity tittle-tattle and not spending enough time in Hemingway’s company? A new breed of device could soon be logging everything you read, letting you see for yourself whether your reading habits need revamping.

The “quantified self” movement has spawned wearable gadgets like Fitbit and FuelBand, which monitor physical fitness, telling you how far you’ve walked or how many calories you’ve burned. How about logging how much you read on screens instead? Like a Fitbit for the mind.

A “cognitive activity tracker” developed by Kai Kunze at Osaka Prefecture University in Japan can tell how many words we read, how often and how fast we read, and even whether we are skim reading or actually concentrating on the content. It could also generate summaries of documents as you read them by logging which passages your eyes dwell on.


Such detail about what we look at, whether on a screen or on paper, is being made possible by the emergence of gaze-trackers – devices that monitor our eyes to analyse where we are looking. Swedish firm Tobii Technology is leading the way in commercialising the technology. It has developed a $99 system that uses infrared cameras trained on the cornea to watch for the eyeball’s movements. These cameras can be built into a headset, such as Google Glass, or clipped to the top of a computer screen or tablet.

Eye-tracking cameras can be built into a headset, such as Google Glass, or clipped to your screen

This year Tobii will launch its first consumer eye-tracking system for video games, in conjunction with gaming headset maker SteelSeries of Copenhagen, Denmark. This will allow in-game characters to react to the player’s gaze, adding a spooky level of realism to first-person shooters. Crucially, the low price puts eye-tracking systems within everyone’s reach, says Ralf Biedert, Tobii’s chief interaction researcher, based in Stockholm.

Kunze is taking the technology in a different direction. In tests on volunteers wearing infrared eye-tracking glasses, his team found that their software could count the number of words read with an accuracy of about 94 per cent, and tell how fast you were reading, purely by looking at the movement of the eyes. By asking their volunteers to read different types of materials – novels, fashion magazines, newspapers, research papers and textbooks – they have shown that these various media can be discerned near perfectly from the way readers’ eyes move around their telltale layouts.

For example, users would get Fitbit-style metrics on how much time they spend – or waste – reading celebrity gossip when they should be revising. Or, says Kunze, publishers could work out if textbook designs need rethinking by seeing how readers navigate their pages. If the software knows what the document is – a novel being read on a Kindle, say – then more advanced features can be used. “It could lead to adaptive reading materials in which the computer recognises I have trouble understanding a particular word and changes the text in real time to give me the definition in the next sentence,” he says. Kunze will reveal more at the Augmented Human meeting in Kobe, Japan, in March.

Eye-tracking experts are abuzz. “I find it difficult to be consciously aware of my reading habits and my ability to absorb the textual information that surrounds me. So a reading log like this would really provide new insight, and hopefully help me improve,” says Jayson Turner at the University of Lancaster, UK, who has developed a system that lets people drag and drop computer files using an eye-tracker. He thinks Kunze’s system will be perfect for quickly summarising what fascinates us.

“It could infer which topics we find interesting, filtering out information we find irrelevant and recording what’s important for later recall,” Turner says.

Biedert says gaze-trackers could have a profound impact. “It’s like when the computer mouse was invented: controlling computers with your eyes will be supported in more and more applications and we cannot tell yet what they will be.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Reading the reader”