Gaze-aligned head-mounted camera with pan, tilt, and roll motion control for medical documentation and teaching applications

Head-fixed camera systems are widely known, but since they are aligned by the head only and not by the eyes they are not able to always look at what the user is looking at, and the image quality is poor if no effort is made to stabilize the camera. The prototype of a new eye movement controlled head-mounted camera system was developed that is continuously aligned with the orientation of gaze. In doing so, the biological gaze stabilization reflexes are used to keep the video camera stable on target. The system is mobile, head-mounted, and battery driven. Applications like documentation of surgery through the eyes of a surgeon or documentary movies for sports and other activities are conceivable. A demonstrator of the device was already tested during an operation which lasted 2.5 hours. During this surgery, the system was able to document the manual activities in great detail. The resulting movies can also be used for teaching purposes.