Selfie App Scans Eyes For Neurological Diseases

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Watch: Selfie App Scans Eyes For Neurological Diseases

BY TYLER DURDEN

TUESDAY, MAY 03, 2022 - 06:25 PM


Researchers at the University of California San Diego have discovered an innovative way to detect neurological diseases like Alzheimer's through a smartphone app that uses the device's camera to monitor eye movement to assess cognitive health.



UC San Diego reports the new app utilizes the smartphone's RGB selfie camera and the front-facing near-infrared camera to track how a person's pupil changes in size. Those pupil measurements can reveal a person's cognitive condition.



"While there is still a lot of work to be done, I am excited about the potential for using this technology to bring neurological screening out of clinical lab settings and into homes.



"We hope that this opens the door to novel explorations of using smartphones to detect and monitor potential health problems earlier on," said Colin Barry, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego and the lead author of the paper.



Barry said the pupils offer insight into a person's neurological functions. An example of this would be pupil size increases during a challenging cognitive task or unexpected sound. Being able to measure changes in pupil diameter is called a pupil response test.



"A scalable smartphone assessment tool that can be used for large-scale community screenings could facilitate the development of pupil response tests as minimally-invasive and inexpensive tests to aid in the detection and understanding of diseases like Alzheimer's disease. This could have a huge public health impact," said Eric Granholm, a psychiatry professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the MHTech Center.



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