Eye tracking in sports performance research

How to use eye tracking in sports-performance research and other fields that require helmets or safety equipment.

The design of eye trackers has excluded certain sports and industries from leveraging the technology to its full potential due to the restrictions created by the need for protective headgear.

To help solve the issue, our wearable eye tracking glasses are designed to fit easily under helmets and safety accessories, allowing athletes, industrial workers, and other professionals to participate in eye tracking studies.

The benefits of eye tracking in sports research

As professional sports rely increasingly on data, many coaches are looking to leverage technologies like eye tracking as part of their evaluation and training programs.

Eye tracking is popular in sports performance because it can reveal how elite players think and what they focus on. Aspects of the game that cannot be observed or measured manually — at least not systematically. Basketball, golf, and tennis are some of the sports leveraging wearable eye trackers to compare the visual strategies of experts and novices and identify the techniques and strategies that lead to winning shots and improved performance.

William Rahm, a goalie coach with the men’s elite hockey league in Sweden is using our eye tracking glasses to gain insight into how a goalie acts and reacts. According to Rahm, one of the greatest challenges of being a coach is to understand what the player experiences on the ice. By recording what the goalie sees and how their eyes move, our glasses provide Rahm with that insight. He can see how a goalie tracks the puck and scans the ice in real time and he can use that data to help him expedite training and translate subconscious actions into teachable strategies.

The Division of Sports Medicine at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre has a history of using eye tracking to help prevent sports-related injuries and improve athlete training by better understanding human behavior. By utilizing technologies such as eye tracking, Dr. Adam Kiefer aims to enhance training practices and achieve better outcomes for athletes.

The design improvements made to eye trackers to fit under headgear deliver increased research opportunities across a range of sports like cricket, American football, and baseball.

Improving safety and training efficiency in the workplace with eye tracking

The change to the physical specifications of wearable eye trackers has widened the use of our technology in improving workplace safety. By seeing operations through the eyes of workers, workplace designers can gain insight into inefficient processes, distractions, and unsafe conditions.

Given that almost 5,000 people lost their lives at work in the US (2015 figures), safety is an important area for every business. The University of Nebraska used wearable eye trackers to investigate the nature of human error on construction sites and their underlying causes. Their findings about the importance of situational awareness yielded a reliable model for predicting human error and preventing subsequent injuries. This model can be used by safety managers to identify at-risk workers and prevent potentially fatal situations, which is of particular relevance to those in the sectors like mining and manufacturing.

In aviation and other specialized jobs where head and face protection are sometimes required, products like our eye tracking glasses enable research because they allow the tracker to be integrated into other equipment in ways not previously possible.

Combining eye tracking with motion capture data streams

Our integration with Qualisys — a leading provider of motion capture technology — makes it possible to combine the real-time output of eye tracking and motion data. This provides essential information to further improve sports performance, diagnose visual-motor disorders, and more.

To learn more about the latest version of our wearable eye tracking, check out
Tobii Pro Glasses 3 on our website.