In a startling application of digital video game wizardry, doctors have come up with a video game app that is showing much promise in curing kids of Lazy Eye.
Lazy Eye happens to a small percentage of Americans but can lead to other yet problems including depth perception and vision loss. Traditional methods included using a patch on the stronger eye to force the weaker eye to work in tandem. It doesn’t always work and that’s why researchers tried this innovative and ground breaking approach.
The doctors at the Retina Foundation of Southwest, Dallas used an iPad game to get the lazy eye to step in line. They used special glasses that separated the game’s elements that are seen by each eye so that in order to play the game properly both eyes had to work in unison. The results are startling to say the least.
This binocular game approach treatment was applied for two weeks and the kids saw improvement, twice the success of a control group that used the traditional eye patch. The resulting data showed that the kids using the glasses and iPad improved in just 10 hours in the two week experiment as opposed to 28 hours for kids using the patch. The results worked so well that some kids using the patch switched to the glasses and they improved much faster.
Amblyopia, the scientific name for Lazy Eye looks to have found a new high tech treatment that if studies continue to bear out the success of this study, could radically change the way Lazy Eye is treated throughout the world. People could probably use their smartphone with special glasses under the supervision of a doctor. This is just one of thousands of new treatments that computing is bringing to the fore. Perhaps other treatments like this can be gleaned if doctors are willing to explore them.
This might also help the video game industry to produce products that are therapeutic in some way. Such apps could be of great value to millions as well as boost the production level of video games employing millions more and generating incredible revenue in conjunction with medical research.
Optical maladies or just motor control problems might be treatable as well. It’s all a matter of using scientific skill and innovative technology such as Vision Systems Service that could be to the benefit of one and all.
At the beginning of computing such innovations were imagined but now we see them coming to pass. It shows that a marriage between medicine, science, and computing can result in benefits that are astonishing to say the least. Many kids get teased about having Lazy Eye, as teenagers it can cause awful levels of low self esteem. It can prohibit one who suffers from it from getting jobs in presentable public positions such as broadcast news, acting, modeling. Actually there was one veteran character actor named Jack Elam who was famous for his Lazy Eye as it made him look so menacing that he was a staple in western television and major motion pictures his entire career.
That’s a rare situation, and when it comes to kids with a visual problem, this new video game approach applied early can allow the kids to live a normal life with better vision and self esteem.
