Educational cartoon improves patch compliance in kids with amblyopia
Use of a short educational cartoon on patching for occlusion therapy improved compliance among children with amblyopia.
“Compliance with occlusion therapy among children is often problematic,” Saeed Aljohani, OD, a PhD candidate at Salus University, said during his ARVO presentation. “We created a 4-minute educational color cartoon video that explains the importance of wearing the eye patch to children.”
Aljohani said that the story of the cartoon was written under supervision of a speech specialist to ensure that children 3 to 10 years old could understand it, and a child was selected to narrate the scenes.
“The purpose of this research is to investigate the feasibility of using our educational cartoon to improve compliance with patching in amblyopic children and to report pilot data,” he said.
Children enrolled in the study were provided an Eye Patch Assistant with a microsensor that measured daily compliance for 4 weeks. Aljohani and colleagues enrolled children who had a compliance rate of 50% or less to watch the cartoon.
At follow-up, compliance improved from 28.13% to 62.84% after watching the video, and mean daily hours improved from 1.62 hours to 3.08 hours. All children reported enjoying watching this video.
“Our educational cartoon video is feasible for use in a clinical setting, and our pilot results showed a trend of improvement in compliance with patching after children watched the video,” Aljohani said. “We are continuing collecting data from a larger cohort.”
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Aljohani S, et al. The feasibility of an educational cartoon video to improve compliance with patching in amblyopic children. Presented at: Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting; May 6, 2020 (virtual meeting).
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