%J PERVASIVE %L discovery1535735 %P 19-37 %I Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg %C Sydney, Australia %V 5013 %A A Bulling %A JA Ward %A H-W Gellersen %A G Tröster %S Lecture Notes in Computer Science %T Robust Recognition of Reading Activity in Transit Using Wearable Electrooculography %B Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing: Pervasive 2008 %X In this work we analyse the eye movements of people in transit in an everyday environment using a wearable electrooculographic (EOG) system. We compare three approaches for continuous recognition of reading activities: a string matching algorithm which exploits typical characteristics of reading signals, such as saccades and fixations; and two variants of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) - mixed Gaussian and discrete. The recognition algorithms are evaluated in an experiment performed with eight subjects reading freely chosen text without pictures while sitting at a desk, standing, walking indoors and outdoors, and riding a tram. A total dataset of roughly 6 hours was collected with reading activity accounting for about half of the time. We were able to detect reading activities over all subjects with a top recognition rate of 80.2% (71.0% recall, 11.6% false positives) using string matching. We show that EOG is a potentially robust technique for reading recognition across a number of typical daily situations. %D 2008 %O This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. %K Hide Markov Model, Activity Recognition, String Match, Reading Activity, Baseline Drift