Blinking kinematics description through non-invasive measurement

Spontaneous eye blinking is a complex process, which implies the joint actions of the eyelid muscles and the eye globe. These actions provoke the eyelid closure and simultaneous eye retraction into the orbit. Recently, the authors presented a non-invasive technique for measuring both movements that permits calculating several parameters. Following the work from Malbouisson and co-workers, we have fitted the displacement curves of the eyelid to an analytical function and, additionally, we have extended the kinematic model to the eye retraction movements. As a result of the fitting, some dynamic parameters have been presented for the first time in the literature. This study can be easily extended to obtain relevant information about ocular biomechanical properties in physiological optics and provides results that may be of interest in neurophysiology, in order to understand the blinking mechanism.This work was supported by the Generalitat Valenciana project no. GV/2009/002 and by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación through the project no. FIS2009-05639-E/FIS. J. Espinosa acknowledges the support of the Generalitat Valenciana through the project BEST/2010/209. D. Mas acknowledges the support of the Ministerio de Educacion through the project PR2009-0377