Visual Field Training via Parallax Dissociation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Individuals with homonymous hemianopsia resulting from traumatic brain injury or cerebrovascular accident face significant challenges with spatial orientation, balance, and mobility due to impaired ambient spatial visual processing, leading to difficulties in daily activities and safe driving, as conventional visual field tests may produce inaccurate results.
Innovation Solution
The method involves using prisms to dissociate and differentiate between ambient and focal visual information through activities like 'Orbit' and visual training with moving backgrounds or striped screens to reorganize the ambient visual process, allowing patients to perceive the affected field and improve spatial awareness.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If conventional visual field tests are used to assess patients with homonymous hemianopsia, then the testing procedure is simple and standardized, but the results may be inaccurate due to the patient's inability to maintain steady fixation and respond to peripheral stimuli
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary system consisting of a display device showing a central fixation target and moving peripheral elements. This intermediary mediates between the patient's impaired visual processing and the assessment requirements, allowing detection of visual field deficits through observation of saccadic eye movements and fixation stability rather than relying on patient button-pressing responses.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the manual mechanical response system (patient pressing buttons) with an automated optical tracking system that monitors eye position and saccadic movements. This substitution eliminates the need for complex patient coordination while providing continuous, objective measurement of visual field function.
2Reliability
If patients undergo extensive visual training to reorganize ambient visual processing, then spatial awareness and driving safety improve, but the treatment time and complexity increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent employs dynamic visual stimuli that move in controlled patterns around the central fixation target. The moving elements change position, speed, and direction to progressively challenge and reorganize the patient's ambient visual processing, adapting the treatment intensity and complexity based on patient performance rather than using fixed complex protocols.
Solution Approach 2:
The treatment system modifies multiple parameters including stimulus speed, amplitude of movement, contrast, and frequency to progressively challenge the visual system. These parameter changes provide a structured progression that improves spatial awareness and driving safety without requiring complex treatment protocols, as the system automatically adjusts difficulty based on patient response.
3Reliability
If the ambient visual process is reactivated through moving background stimuli, then spatial orientation and balance improve, but the differentiation between ambient and focal visual information becomes more difficult to assess
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the visual stimulus into distinct components: a stable central fixation target representing focal vision and moving peripheral elements representing ambient vision. This segmentation allows independent assessment and training of focal and ambient visual processes simultaneously, as the central target maintains focal attention while peripheral movement challenges ambient spatial processing.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates asymmetric visual conditions by keeping the central fixation target stationary while moving peripheral elements in specific patterns. This asymmetry naturally differentiates between focal (central) and ambient (peripheral) visual processing, making it easier to assess and train each process separately rather than requiring symmetric stimuli that would confound the two visual pathways.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
This approach enables patients to regain functional spatial vision, reducing vertigo, dizziness, and mobility issues, and enhances driving safety by effectively reactivating the ambient visual process to support focalization, potentially reducing false negative results from conventional testing.
Implementation Method 1
The use of parallax to dissociate the focal process from the ambient process allows the ambient process to reorganize.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and apparatus for treating visual field loss by disassociating and differentiating between the ambient and focal visual information of a patient. This is achieved by providing a stationary target for the patient to focus on and a moving, spinning or rotating background relative to the stationary target.