EyeWarn | University of Essex

The University of Essex is leading a groundbreaking BBSRC-funded research project to uncover if mental fatigue and lapses in concentration are reflected through your eyes.

The project uncovers how gaze patterns and pupil dilation indicate cognitive strain, this project aims to build mobile technology capable of monitoring these metrics in real time.

EyeWarn is funded as part of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s (BBSRC) Prosperity Partnerships programme, which aims to bring innovative research into real-world settings.

The project utilises explainable artificial intelligence to assess and predict fatigue levels and offer new insights into how cognitive strain affects behaviour. The Essex team is collaborating with researchers from UK universities and the Solvemed Group to collect and analyse a significant number of samples involving diverse working and fatigue-induced scenarios.

"This project represents a significant advancement in the UK's scientific efforts in Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (HCAI). HCAI is an emerging AI research paradigm that has been gaining momentum in recent years, emphasising humanised AI-driven methodologies and analytics designed to enhance humans or human systems. EyeWarn places a strong emphasis on enhancing our understanding and monitoring of human factors such as fatigue and its effects on the body through the eye."

Dr Javier Andreu-Perez Project Lead and Chair of the Smart Health Technologies Group, Centre for Computational Intelligence

Investigators

Dr Javier Andreu-Perez

Principal Investigator

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Javier is Principal Investigator for EyeWarn and Chair of the Smart Health Technologies Group. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning and their applications in engineering, bioengineering, health informatics, human-robot interaction, computer vision, smart sensing & industrial informatics.

Professor Phoebe Moore

Co-investigator

Essex Business School, University of Essex

Moore’s contributions are in related to her research areas of occupational safety and health for workers, biometric tracking, and normative management and legal dimensions in these spheres, as they relate to government regulation, industry policies and ethics.

Yaxiong Lei

Senior Research Officer

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Within EyeWarn, Yaxiong’s contributions span computer vision methods for gaze estimation and eye-movement sensing/modelling, alongside mobile application development to enable in-the-wild gaze behaviour data collection and analysis to understand the fatigue changes in daily life. He also supports experimental design and the validation of ocular features and analysis methods for fatigue-related inference.

Dr Parastoo Azizinezhad

Senior Research Officer

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Parastoo’s research focuses on the development of AI-driven behavioral models to detect user fatigue and cognitive strain through pupillary dynamics and eye-tracking data.

Dr Tom Foulsham

Co-investigator

Department of Psychology, University of Essex

In EyeWarn, Tom contributes expertise in human experiments and eye tracking as the team develops new ways to track eye behaviour during fatigue.

Mohammadreza Jamalifard

Postgraduate Research Student

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

For EyeWarn, Reza is developing computational models to identify cross-modal patterns that indicate fatigue with explainability mostly focused on ocular behaviour.