Development of family level assessment of screen use in the home for television (FLASH-TV)

Screen use, including TV viewing, among children is associated with their physical and mental development. The most common assessment of TV viewing are self-reports and these introduce significant error. Objective measures are needed to improve research approaches to inform screen use guidelines. We present an objective approach to assess TV viewing as participant’s gaze on the screen. F amily L evel A ssessment of S creen use in the H ome (FLASH-TV) uses state-of-the-art computer vision methods for face detection, recognition, and gaze estimation to process images and estimate the amount of time a child in the family spends watching TV. We recruited 21 triads of participants for the development of the FLASH-TV system who took part in 1.5 h observation studies with 5 in participants’ homes. We evaluated each step of FLASH-TV by comparing to human-labeled ground truth data. Face detection and recognition methods achieved more than 90% sensitivity in detecting the target child under the challenging conditions of low lighting and poor resolution on a subset of test frames. Our final step of gaze estimation achieved more than 70% sensitivity and 85% specificity when evaluated on all of 3 million gaze/no-gaze labeled frames from 21 triads. Finally, our combined three-step system achieved 4.68 min mean absolute error of the TV watching time with a mean ground-truth TV watching time of 21.72 min. This method offers an objective approach to measure a child’s TV viewing, with validation studies underway.