Head Motion Tracking Through in-Ear Wearables

Head tracking is a fundamental component in visual attention detection, which, in turn, can improve the state of the art of hearing aid devices. A multitude of wearable devices for the ear (so called earables) exist. Current devices lack a magnetometer which, as we will show, represents a big challenge when one tries to use them for accurate head tracking. In this work we evaluate the performance of eSense, a representative earable device, to track head rotations. By leveraging two different streams (one per earbud) of inertial data (from the accelerometer and the gyroscope), we achieve an accuracy up to a few degrees. We further investigate the interference generated by a magnetometer in an earable to understand the barriers to its use in these types of devices.