Eye tracking drives innovation in healthcare: NovaSight

Part four in a series of articles showcasing some of the inventive ways our partners and customers are using eye tracking in healthcare applications.

Imagine binge-watching your favorite TV-series or movies to cure a medical condition. That’s just what NovaSight, a visionary start-up, is currently trialing to diagnose and treat children with lazy eye (amblyopia).

Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is the leading cause of vision loss in children and can result, for example, from an eye muscle imbalance, uneven refraction error between the eyes, or cataracts. Study findings vary, but lazy eye appears to affect between about
2-5 percent of the population depending on geographic location, with the highest prevalence in Europe. Left untreated, children with amblyopia may develop reading and learning difficulties. If it persists into adulthood, it can dampen academic achievements, sports skills, self-image, and limit many other day-to-day functionalities.

Such consequences may significantly impact an individual’s life, yet they can be mitigated through early detection and effective treatment.

The ability for both eyes to focus on an object simultaneously continues to develop until the age of about 7. For best results, detection and remediation need to take place beforehand.

Today, detection requires trained personnel, and children need to be vision tested at a young age. Once detected, the success rate of traditional treatments, such as the use of eye patches, glasses, and eye drops, depends on the ability of young children to comply with these types of remedies.

NovaSight’s visionary solutions, currently being evaluated in clinical trials, are set to change conventional detection and remediation approaches radically. Leveraging Tobii eye tracking technologies, AI, and big-data analysis along with a sophisticated configuration of advanced eyeglasses, optics, and purpose-built displays, NovaSight’s solutions provide a systematic and objective approach to the detection and treatment of lazy eye.

Detection with NovaSight’s EyeSwift® PRO system relies on eye tracking to evaluate the patient’s vision.

The system has a powerful portfolio of vision protocols, such as myopia and amblyopia monitoring, binocular and computer vision, reading analysis, and more. Each protocol automatically runs the specific tests relevant to the condition and outputs a clear report, which can be easily understood by the operator and the patient.

The NovaSight approach is a noninvasive and more comfortable treatment for kids than, say, wearing an eye patch — which they hate!

Compared with the gold standard of patching in children, CureSight is the only method proven to be effective in a large pivotal study to date. Best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) in the treatment group was greater, and second-line improvement showed CureSight 79% vs. patching 61%. The CureSight method also showed improved stereoacuity as both eyes work together.

The study (An eye-tracking–based dichoptic home treatment for amblyopia) exhibited 93% adherence to the CureSight treatment, which was accurately measured by the device’s eye tracking system, and revealed that parents showed a 95% likelihood of choosing CureSight over patching.

CureSight is FDA-cleared and CE-marked under the MDR directive and has been commercially available in the US and Europe since the beginning of 2023 — already appearing to be a blockbuster among physicians and patients.

Essilor, NovaSight’s global partner and world leader in the ophthalmic optics market, is the primary vendor for the EyeSwift® system. NovaSight will shortly launch a multicenter randomized clinical trial in the US, to compare the efficacy of the CureSight™ system with patching treatments.