Assessing Visual Engagement for Visuomotor Skills Rehabilitation Training in Infants Pedro Dias 1,3 , Ana Ferreira 2,4 , Claudia Quaresma 1,2 , Carla Quintão 1,2 , and Ricardo Vigário 1,2(&) 1 Physics Department, Nova School of Science and Technology, Nova University Lisbon, 2892-516 Caparica, Portugal ph.dias@campus.fct.unl.pt, {q.claudia,cmquintao, r.vigario}@fct.unl.pt 2 Laboratory of Instrumentation, Biomedical Engineering and Radiation Physics (LIBPhys-UNL), Physics Department, Nova School of Science and Technology, Nova University Lisbon, 2892-516 Caparica, Portugal aix.ferreira@campus.fct.unl.pt 3 Value4Health, Collaborative Laboratory, 1150-082 Lisbon, Portugal 4 School of Health, Polytechnic Institute of Beja, 7800-111 Beja, Portugal Abstract. Simple visual stimuli, with bright colours and dynamically evolving over time, are among the most effective mechanisms through which to engage a baby´s attention. In earlier work, we have developed a visual stimulating tool to aid rehabilitation programs, which can be used with infants of up to 2 years of age. The feedback from the early use of the device has been rather positive. Yet, until now, there was no explicit way to assess the degree of engagement of the infant’s attention, or even when the focus of said attention moved away from the stimulus. Hence, it has been dif ficult to understand whether the proposed specific rehabilitation procedure has failed, for a given infant, or the loss of attention led to a decrease in ef ficiency in the intervention. In the current work we develop and exploit a simple eye tracking tool, based on a laptop’s own webcam, to evaluate the child’s loss of attention to visual stimuli. The main differentiating criterion, set forth for this eyetracker, is that it should work without an explicit calibration stage. The use of the specific camera is motivated with the fact that the laptop can be used for visual stimuli deliver, as well as a series of data processing steps. The results attained thus far were rather encouraging, leading even to a subsequent study, replacing infants by adults undergoing a rehabilitation program, after suffering from brain stroke. Keywords: Visual attention monitoring Á Rehabilitation Á Eyetracker Á No calibration Á Infants 1 Introduction The very early stages of development of an infant are paramount to shape her/his future ability to cope with the World. In fact, it is in the first few years of a child’s life that neuroplasticity plays the most important role in developing the functional structure of the infant’s brain [1]. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 I. L. Nunes (Ed.): AHFE 2020, AISC 1207, pp. 272–279, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51369-6_37