Analysis of Eye Tracking of Physiotherapist during Walk Rehabilitation

The measurement of walking is important for evaluating the health of elderly people. This evaluation is performed by experts in gait assessment (such as doctors or physiotherapists), who vary in terms of skill. To guarantee evaluative quality, engineering of gait-measurement solutions is desired. This paper describes a method of quantifying tacit physiotherapist knowledge of walk rehabilitation by tracking and analysing their eyes. We constructed the eye-tracking system to extract the points of gaze of multiple physiotherapists. The result shows that proficient physiotherapists exhibit special eye movements, which we defined as ‘rhythmical’. We evaluated the proficiencies of all subjects based on their rhythmical-eye movement. It is clear that proficiency does not increase linearly with rhythmical-eye movement, but instead exhibits a staircase-like behaviour. Consequently, we elucidated that the ‘rhythmical-eye movement’ is one part of tacit knowledge of the proficient physiotherapists. And it is useful to establish the walking measurement closer to the proficient physiotherapists.