We present a method to automatically calculate sensing time (ST) from the eye
tracker data in subjects with neurological impairment using a driving
simulator. ST presents the time interval for a person to notice the stimulus
from its first occurrence. Precisely, we measured the time since the children
started to cross the street until the drivers directed their look to the
children. In comparison to the commonly used reaction time, ST does not require
additional neuro-muscular responses such as braking and presents unique
information on the sensory function. From 108 neurological patients recruited
for the study, the analysis of ST was performed in overall 56 patients to
assess fit-, unfit-, and conditionally-fit-to-drive patients. The results
showed that the proposed method based on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) object
detector is efficient for computing STs from the eye tracker data in
neurological patients. We obtained discriminative results for fit-to-drive
patients by application of Tukey's Honest Significant Difference post hoc test
(p < 0.01), while no difference was observed between conditionally-fit and
unfit-to-drive groups (p = 0.542). Moreover, we show that time-to-collision
(TTC), initial gaze distance (IGD) from pedestrians, and speed at the hazard
onset did not influence the result, while the only significant interaction is
among fitness, IGD, and TTC on ST. Although the proposed method can be applied
to assess fitness to drive, we provide directions for future driving
simulation-based evaluation and propose processing workflow to secure reliable
ST calculation in other domains such as psychology, neuroscience, marketing,
etc.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table