Quantifying Reading Habits - Counting How Many Words You Read

Reading is a very common learning activity, a lot of people perform it everyday even while standing in the subway or waiting in the doctors office. However, we know little about our everyday reading habits, quantifying them enables us to get more insights about better language skills, more effective learning and ultimately critical thinking. This paper presents a first contribution towards establishing a reading log, tracking how much reading you are doing at what time. We present an approach capable of estimating the words read by a user, evaluate it in an user independent approach over 3 experiments with 24 users over 5 different devices (e-ink reader, smartphone, tablet, paper, computer screen). We achieve an error rate as low as 5% (using a medical electrooculography system) or 15% (based on eye movements captured by optical eye tracking) over a total of 30 hours of recording. Our method works for both an optical eye tracking and an Electrooculography system. We provide first indications that the method works also on soon commercially available smart glasses.