The aim of the current proposal is to create a novel, fast and objective system for evaluating reading difficulties in children using low budget eye tracking technology so that it can be used by families at home, special education teachers, schools, diagnostic centers etc.

The system will be able to evaluate within minutes the students that needs to be referred to a specialist due to reading difficulties. The system will record eye tracking data during reading and will correlate eye tracking patterns with most common reading difficulties (e.g. dyslexia). In this proposal, we will try to find the characteristics that have the highest discriminative power and the highest reproducibility. Using these characteristics, we will create a fast and robust screening tool that will determine, within a few minutes, if a child has or has not reading difficulties.

We will study a population of students in order to find the parameters that separate normal readers from readers experiencing reading difficulties. In addition, we will try to identify the type of reading difficulty a student has, in order to help the specialist to provide a customized treatment for the student.

In parallel, we will create a small-scale internet platform, so that every family that has the appropriate equipment, will be able to record, send, and get back the results of the reading competence of their children.