Psychology professor spins innovative eye-tracking research off into lucrative company

If it’s true that “the eyes are the windows to the soul,” Sandra Marshall can tell an awful lot about you.

A psychology professor known for her research on decision-making, Marshall has developed a technology to track the eye movement and cognitive activity of a viewer observing a particular object or scene.

Eye Tracking, Inc. Chief Technology Officer Cassandra Davis
fits Sandra Marshall with eye-tracking camera goggles.

By using small video cameras to film a subject’s eyes as they take in visual information or perform a task, she can plot the eye’s path and response to the action being performed.

Though she can’t read your mind, Marshall can determine your mental state.

“Using change in pupil size along with blink rate and other information, we can detect if someone is fatigued, confused, bored or overloaded,” said Marshall.

In fact, she may be able to predict your responses to challenging situations, a capability that has significant applications to surgery, education, space travel, tactical warfare and homeland security.

Looking for answers

Two military disasters gave Marshall an opportunity to test the eye-tracking technology.

In 1987, the USS Stark, deployed to the Middle East, failed to respond to a deadly missile attack by an Iraqi pilot. The following year, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 passengers

The incidents were tragic and naval leadership demanded improvement. Looking for answers, they turned to a group of researchers, including Marshall.

“They felt people were not functioning well under stress; they wanted to know what factors were affecting the decision-making process,” she recalled.

When Marshall saw that commanding officers often made decisions while looking at their computer screens, she realized the difficulty of modeling their thought processes.

There could be only one way to gauge what was going on inside their heads; she needed to see what they were looking at. Marshall persuaded the Navy to supply her with her first eye-tracking system.

The next level

In her early work, Marshall used the eye cameras to track eye focus and synchronized that information with the progression of images on the radar screen. The process told her what visual information the naval officers had – and, more importantly, didn’t have – when making critical decisions.

An eye camera records eye movement and pupil changes,
providing insight into the subject’s mental state.

Her interest piqued, Marshall took the eye-tracking technology a step further. She and her team developed an Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA), which she eventually patented. The ICA measures pupil dilation and other factors to gauge a subject’s understanding of the information he is viewing and his emotional response to it.

Whether that subject is a novice microsurgeon being evaluating for competence, an astronaut sampling moon conditions for future colonization or a potentially drunk driver behind the wheel, the eye-tracking data has the potential to improve – and even save – lives.

During Marshall’s early work with the Navy, these were only remote possibilities. But today, with contracts coming from NASA, European automakers and medical practitioners, Marshall and her team at Eye Tracking, Inc. spend their days making such applications a reality.

Spinning off

At first, Marshall had reservations about spinning the work off into a business, and with good reason.

“It’s extremely difficult to commercialize research,” said Mike Rondelli, director of the SDSU Technology Transfer Office (TTO). “Things coming out of universities are generally very early.”

The TTO helps researchers like Marshall protect and commercialize technologies developed under federally funded grants. This security has been enforced by the Bayh-Dole Act since 1980, ensuring promising technologies don’t go unused or unprotected.

“You’re not going to invest billions of dollars to make the next antibiotic if someone else can read your paper and copy it for free,” Rondelli said. “With the change in the legislation, universities can own the intellectual property that’s created by the faculty and find commercial vehicles for it or license it to companies like Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin or Google.”

Psychology professor Sandra Marshall
spun her eye-tracking research off into
a thriving company.

In the case of Eye-Tracking, Inc., Marshall is the inventor, SDSU owns the ICA patent, and the TTO helped draw up the agreement to license it exclusively to the company for commercial use.

The office also provided access to potential clients and funding opportunities, like those offered through SDSU’s Center for Commercialization of Advanced Technology (CCAT).

“We were very impressed with the innovation and were of the opinion, and still are, that no one else has the capabilities this company does,” said Lou Kelly, Chairman of the CCAT Executive Board. “Marshall has been creating the market.”

CCAT funded an initial market study that confirmed the existence of several profitable opportunities for the eye-tracking technology.

It also arranged for several beta tests within the Department of Defense and introduced Marshall to the San Diego head of the Transportation Security Administration. In a project that continues to this day, she began working with airport baggage screeners to test recognition of dangerous items.

Eyeing the future

Since those first projects, the government has continued to be an important client for Eye Tracking, Inc., but Web design has also provided a steady stream of work. The technology lends itself well to the marketing field: Marshall’s team test the effectiveness of a Web page, advertisement, or brochure and determine what information potential customers retain.

Today, the company counts MSN, Motorola and Panasonic among its many clients.

Eye-Tracking, Inc. has doubled in size and is still looking to expand in order to meet the growing demand for its services.

“At first, when I would go and make presentations to a company, I would have to begin by telling them what eye-tracking was … so it was a long presentation,” said Marshall, laughing. “Now we’ve come such a long way, most large U.S. companies already know about eye-tracking and have often already decided they want it.”

Related information

• Sandra Marshall
• Eye Tracking, Inc.
• SDSU Technology Transfer Office
• SDSU CCAT
• Bayh-Dole Act
• Intellectual Property
• Index of Cognitive Activity

Credits

• Story by Lauren Coartney
• Story edited by Coleen L. Geraghty
• Graphics by John Signer
• Photographs by Tom Farrington