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Augmented reality visual aids may improve mobility in RP patients
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Angelopoulos
Use of augmented reality low-vision aids for patients with retinitis pigmentosa may assist with mobility and grasp, a recent study suggests.
“When exposed to our AR low vision aid, which encodes distance as discrete color bands, even people who were totally colorblind using clinical tests were able to differentiate between different depths,” Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, BA, a PhD student at the University of California Berkley and co-founder of MHR Vision, told Primary Care Optometry News. “This is surprising and could be due to the different grayscale intensities of colors.”
Researchers at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine conducted a single-masked and randomized trial of the AR pseudo color low vision aid to evaluate mobility and grasp in 10 patients with retinitis pigmentosa and visual acuity less than 20/80 or a visual field less than 30 degrees. Each subject completed a highly controlled, reconfigurable obstacle course with and without the AR headset, with a masked grader viewing an anonymized video of each test and recording completion time as well as the number of times the patient collided with obstacles. Grasp was measured via a custom-made grasping setup.
Subjects showed an average of 50% fewer collisions in subjects using the AR aids opposed to those not using them (P = .02). Eight of the nine subjects analyzed performed better overall in the mobility test with the AR aid, with one subject excluded, as they were unable to complete the course without the device. Patients using AR also showed a 30% shorter completion time, but the result was not found to be statistically significant.
All four subjects who made grasp errors during the test made significantly fewer errors with the AR, with an overall 70% increase in grasp performance (P = .03). Additionally, four of the seven subjects finished the grasp test in less time with AR vs. without. An overall mean grasp improvement of 78% was observed but was not found to be statistically significant.
“Augmented reality can provide a useful platform for head-mounted low vision aids, allowing people with severe visual disabilities to achieve significantly safer mobility,” Angelopoulos told PCON. “Other intuitive forms of depth encoding should also be studied, such as time-domain oscillation of the brightness, saturation of high-risk objects, audiovisual cues, and tracking the velocity and depth of objects to determine their risk to the subject.”— by Eamon Dreisbach
Disclosures: Angelopoulos reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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