Project Overview

The bio-inspired eye tracker project is a Bioengineering Senior Design project completed by Serena Tang, Stephanie Ogrey, Keli Wang, Sana Khan, and Jorge Villazon with mentorship from Gert Cauwenberghs and Akshay Paul from the Integrated Systems Neuralengineering Lab at UC San Diego.

You can learn more about our project and subprojects through the various links on this website and a brief overview of the project can be seen on the link below. UCSD Bioengineering Day 2022 website

Project Overview Video:

A brief overview video of our project is shown below.

Problem Statement:

Despite the fact that marmosets are one of the most common primates utilized in neuroscience studies, there is currently not a low weight, compact eye-tracking system that can be used for research involving quick-moving, unconstrained marmosets. Large and heavy systems may create stress and physiological damage for the monkeys, which is highly unethical. With a lower weight system, the marmosets will be able to wear the device for longer periods of time; thus, allowing for a more efficient collection of their eye gaze data. Current systems of tracking marmoset gaze are either not power-efficient, resulting in shorter experiments and less data acquisition, or too large for the marmosets to carry and move around, reducing the accuracy of data acquired from marmosets interacting with their environments. A further aspect of this problem is ensuring that the eye tracking data can be analyzed in a reliable, user-friendly manner. Although many current eye-tracking systems output videos taken from a standard camera onto an SD card or use other means, these large video files may be difficult to analyze in a meaningful way.

Written by: Serena Tang

Edited by: Stephanie Ogrey