FLASH – Family Level Assessment Of Screen Usage In The Home

In collaboration with the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine I worked on developing a system to accurately and unobtrusively measure the screen usage in the home ranging from TV to handheld devices, such as tablets. This system will be used to understand how watching TV or other forms of screen usage can increase the likelihood of a child becoming overweight in the future. Through face recognition, head pose estimation, as well as gaze estimation on videos from stationary cameras and mobile devices, we were able to infer if a person is looking at the screen or not and who was watching at a given time. The videos captured on mobile devices were especially challenging to analyze due to large motion and blur, so we are currently working on analyzing motion sensors data in addition to video from mobile devices that will improve the estimate.