They can be administered to people of any age and have (using earlier eye-tracking setups) contributed to many identifications of the diseases. The Parkinson’s and Huntington’s tests watch for the more well understood patterns that accompany the motor degeneration found in those afflictions. Lingering on the shapes more than the people, it turns out, is a good indicator that at the very least the kid should receive further testing. The Autism spectrum test is for children aged only 1 to 3, and watches eye movements between images of people and images of geometric shapes. It’s not a magic bullet, but again, the quick and easy nature of the tests make them ideal for routine screening. In 2016, RightEye acquired the rights to a pair of tests based on research linking eye movement patterns to Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, as well as Autism spectrum conditions. Honestly, I think a kid might even find it fun.īarclay has personal experience with this, her own daughter having had health issues that only after multiple false starts were found to have their root in a relatively simple vision problem the system indicated. RightEye’s test practically runs itself and can detect or eliminate the possibility of vision problems in minutes. This isn’t some groundbreaking new idea - but reliably and objectively evaluating individual eye movements was only something you could do if you went to see a specialist, perhaps after other explanations for a behavior didn’t pan out. What 3rd-grade kid would keep at it?Ī reading-focused test tracks how the eyes move along a line of text. A subtle difference in how the eyes track, perhaps one going off the horizontal when tracking a line of text, could easily make reading on the page or blackboard frustrating or even painful. But it’s more than a little possible that it’s a vision problem. The immediate thought these days is frequently ADD. Say a child is having trouble learning to read, or perhaps can’t pay attention in class.
The two most exciting applications of the technology, as judged by her enthusiasm anyway, are in identifying vision-related cognitive problems in kids and in creating a sort of eye fitness test for sporting persons. I tested the device out myself at CES (my vision is just OK, but I want a rematch), and later chatted with Barbara Barclay, RIghtEye’s President. It’s compact and can run on battery for some 8 hours, making it ideal for deployment outside hospitals or the like: anywhere from school nurse’s office to the sidelines of an NFL game, even in the home. An easy-to-understand results sheet shows their actual movements and how (if at all) they deviate from the baseline.
In another test, you flick your eyes rapidly between two targets appearing on opposite sides of the screen, demonstrating accuracy and functioning saccades (micro-corrections made by your eye muscles).Įach eye is tracked independently, and their performance as a matched pair is evaluated instantly. But certain colored ships you must not destroy - meaning you have to detect them in your peripheral vision and avoid looking at them.
To give you an idea: one test in game form has you defending a space station, destroying incoming ships by looking at them. A basic EyeQ (as they call it) test takes five minutes or so, with more specialized tests adding only a few more, and results are available immediately. RightEye tracks these movements with a custom device that looks a bit like an all-in-one desktop it uses a Tobii eye-tracking module built into a single-purpose computer loaded with a library of simple tests. But certain patterns well outside the baseline can be strong indicators of things like concussions and eye muscle problems - and even Parkinson’s and Autism-spectrum conditions. For healthy individuals, these variations fall within a safe range, just part of the ordinary differences between bodies.