One in 20 children in the UK have lazy eye (amblyopia), which causes reduced sight in one eye. It is treated with eye patching therapy, which requires children to wear an eye patch over their better seeing eye for 2 to 6 hours per day for 6 to 24 months. Patching is effective, should be completed before 8 years of age, but is visually and physically uncomfortable for children.
At the beginning of patching therapy, children complete an average of 60% of the recommended dose (in hours per day) and by day 60 of treatment this reduces to 40%.
Half of children never achieve driving-standard vision in their affected eye, which reduces their lifelong visual experience, future career opportunities, and health-related quality of life. Children from low socio-economic backgrounds disproportionately account for number with the disease and number not achieving driving standard vision.
Groups have developed games and gamifications to improve care of people with asthma and obesity. In addition, games to improve general health care provision for young people and vision-care for young people have been successfully developed.
We are going to develop an accessible game to encourage children to wear their eye patch. The game will have facility to recognise when the player (child with amblyopia) is wearing their patch and offer enhanced gameplay (“superpowers”) during the time the patch is worn. We will achieve this by using AI-based eye-tracking technology and sophisticated data-driven engagement analysis, thereby fusing recent advances in clinical care, Human-Centred AI, and Data Science.
Principal Investigator: Mr James Self
Co-investigators: Professor Joerg Fliege, James Stallwood, Daniel Osborne