

#                                  Attention Analysis of Children 


| Supervisors | Name |
| ------ | ------ |
| Supervisor | Dr. Pradeepa Samarasinghe |
| Co-Supervisor | Ms. Madhuka Nadeeshani | 
| External Supervisor | Dr. Dulangi Dahanayaka and Ms. Vidushani Dhanawansa |

### Research Team:
* #####       IT19110530 - Pramodini A.A.D.A 
* #####       IT19114040 - Jayakody J.A.D.K.A
* #####       IT19165226 - Arachchige I.D
* #####       IT19177106 - Wasala W.L.M.K.S


### Main Objective: Attention Analysis Of Children
### Main Research questions: 
##### Inattention which is identified as the lack of concentration and focus, forgetfulness, poor completion of tasks, and distractibility, have a negative influence on the health and education of the child. The ability of a child to deal with the social, physical, and educational demands of everyday life is crucially dependent on the development of the child’s attention. With abundant evidence that early diagnosis and intervention improves results, there is a compelling need to address the gap between need and access to treatment and also between research and practical application. Therefore the group of 4 researchers are developing a mobile application which covers numerous tasks such as, identifying behavioral patterns on gaze following task, screen-based set of tasks for attention impairments in young children and facilitate interventions, Analysis of response to name calling, Developing a model to analyze children’s attention details on a screen-based game. 


### Individual Research Questions


##### IT19110530: Pramodini A.A.D.A
###### Since Sri Lanka is still a developing country in the world, there are very few tools and technologies to detect attention of young children based on joint-attention and gaze following tasks. And moreover, Sri Lankan parents are not very aware of the disorders and impairments of young children. Lack of knowledge, cultural barriers, and tools to diagnose their children's attention is one major problem in Sri Lanka. So, our main objective is to implement a fully functional culturally sensitive mobile based attention analysis framework that diagnoses and analyses the attention of Sri Lankan children.
*  Individual Main Objective: The main objective of this research is to Identify different behavioral patterns on joint-attention and gaze following tasks of Sri Lankan children through video recording and extracting video frames from the captured videos.
*  Individual Sub Objectives: 

        •	Design set of tasks to evaluate the joint attention of children.

        •	Design set of tasks to evaluate the gaze following task for children
        
        •	Design and develop head pose estimation model for children and evaluate the head pose estimation on children
        
        •	Develop a model to analyze gaze following and joint-attention task and evaluate gaze following and joint-attention task of children through the model
        
##### IT19114040 - Jayakody J. A. D. K. A.
###### Sri Lanka lacks an interactive tool for assessing and training all the five major aspects of visual attention (focused attention, selective attention, divided attention, sustained attention, alternating attention). The proposed mobile component addresses this gap.
*  Individual Research Question: Development of a mobile application to screen for attention impairments in young children and facilitate interventions

*  Individual Sub Objectives: 

        •	Identifying a series of gaming activities and tasks to train the different aspects of visual attention in young children based on their age.
        
        •	Development of a model to assess the attention of the child through the series of selected gaming activities.
        
        •	Assessing the visual attention of young children using the developed model.
        
        •	Providing awareness about attention disorders and preliminary guidance via the mobile application.


##### IT19165226: Arachchige I.D
###### Currently there are no specific details(time taken to respond, amount of eye contact given, time spent being focused) about the response a child makes to when their name is being called which is affected by various reasons: how interested they are, the amount of urgency in the caller's tone and relationship to caller.
*  Individual Main Objective: The main objective of this research is to develop a model to analyse behavioral patterns in children aged 1 to 3 years for response to their name being called.
*  Individual Sub Objectives: 

        •	Identifying and designing an experiment to cater the different factors that affect the response to name calling in the age group 1-3. 

        •	Development of a speech recognition model to identify when the child’s name was called. 
        
        •	Development of a model to analyze head pose estimation of a child. 
        
        •	Development of a framework to understand behavioral patterns in toddlers when their name has been called.


##### IT19177106: Wasala W.L.M.K.S
###### With the advancement of the medical field there are many attention related disorders have been identified.It is critical to identify these disorders as early as possible to start treatments.Early detection of those disorders it allowed to early intervention.But, in countries like Sri Lanka, there is no such practice to screen and diagnose these disorders at such early ages.There are some ways to tracking someone’s gaze on a computer screen using a camera. But these are not specially targeted for children.
*  Individual Main Objective: The Main objective is developing a model to analyze children’s attention details on a screen-based task. 
*  Individual Sub Objectives: 

        •	Identifying a model to map a child’s eye gaze to the observing screen.

        •	Developing a series of screen-based tasks to assess the child’s attention based on the mapping developed in the model.
        
        •	Evaluate the attention of the child using the developed screen-based task and the model that used to map child gaze to the observing screen.
        