Background: The visual assessment of infants poses specific challenges: many\ntechniques that are used on adults are based on the patientââ?¬â?¢s response, and are not\nsuitable for infants. Significant advances in the eye-tracking have made this assessment\nof infant visual capabilities easier, however, eye-tracking still requires the subjectââ?¬â?¢s collaboration,\nin most cases and thus limiting the application in infant research. Moreover,\nthere is a lack of transferability to clinical practice, and thus it emerges the need for\na new tool to measure the paradigms and explore the most common visual competences\nin a wide visual field. This work presents the design, development and preliminary\ntesting of a new system for measuring infantââ?¬â?¢s gaze in the wide visual field called\nCareToy C: CareToy for Clinics.\nMethods: The system is based on a commercial eye tracker (SmartEye) with six cameras\nrunning at 60 Hz, suitable for measuring an infantââ?¬â?¢s gaze. In order to stimulate the\ninfant visually and audibly, a mechanical structure has been designed to support five\nspeakers and five screens at a specific distance (60 cm) and angle: one in the centre,\ntwo on the right-hand side and two on the left (at 30Ã?° and 60Ã?° respectively). Different\ntasks have been designed in order to evaluate the system capability to assess the\ninfantââ?¬â?¢s gaze movements during different conditions (such as gap, overlap or audiovisual\nparadigms). Nine healthy infants aged 4ââ?¬â??10 months were assessed as they\nperformed the visual tasks at random.\nResults: We developed a system able to measure infantââ?¬â?¢s gaze in a wide visual field\ncovering a total visual range of Ã?±60Ã?° from the centre with an intermediate evaluation\nat Ã?±30Ã?°. Moreover, the same system, thanks to different integrated software, was able\nto provide different visual paradigms (as gap, overlap and audio-visual) assessing and\ncomparing different visual and multisensory sub-competencies. The proposed system\nendowed the integration of a commercial eye-tracker into a purposive setup in a smart\nand innovative way.\nConclusions: The proposed system is suitable for measuring and evaluating infantââ?¬â?¢s\ngaze capabilities in a wide visual field, in order to provide quantitative data that can\nenrich the clinical assessment.
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