An Electro-Oculography Circuit for Detecting Eye Movements for Low-Power Displays

This demo presents a novel paradigm for power-managing a display based on the user’s eye movement. The display power is reduced by dimming the brightness when the user is not attending to the display content, which is determined by sensing the user’s eye movements with the electrooculography technique (EOG). An EOG circuit was designed to pick up the electrical signals generated from eye movements, especially the saccades. By analyzing the frequency and amplitude of saccadic eye movements, the user’s viewing status can be estimated and classified into four modes: text reading, image viewing, idling, and away. Different brightness profiles are assigned to different modes by implementing the policy and backlight control within an FPGA board. A custom-made TFT-LCD was used to demonstrate the proposed concept. Up to 30% of power savings can be obtained in our experiments.