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Smartphone App Shows Promise for Neurological Screening at Home
A smartphone-based app that provides pupil measurements comparable to a gold-standard pupillometer could allow for the screening of Alzheimer disease and other neurological conditions at home. Researchers from the University of California (UC) San Diego presented on their novel app at the recent Computer Human Interaction Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, or CHI 2022, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
“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,” said first author Colin Barry, an electrical and computer engineering PhD student at UC San Diego. “We hope that this opens the door to novel explorations of using smartphones to detect and monitor potential health problems earlier on.”
Recent developments in medical and psychiatric research show pupil size can provide information about a person’s neurological function. A difficult cognitive task or an unexpected sound, for instance, typically causes an increase in pupil size. Assessing changes in a person’s cognitive condition by measuring changes in pupil diameter via a pupil response test, however, currently requires costly, specialized equipment.
The app uses a smartphone’s near-infrared camera, a tool already built into newer phone models for facial recognition, to detect and measure the size of a person’s pupil with submillimeter accuracy across various eye colors. The selfie camera captures the stereoscopic distance between the smartphone and the user, allowing the app to convert the pupil size from the near-infrared image into millimeter units.
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“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 disease,” said Eric Granholm, PhD, a psychiatry professor and director of the UC San Diego Center for Mental Health Technology. “This could have a huge public health impact.”
The developers also worked with older adults to design an app interface to guide inexperienced users through self-administration of pupil response tests. The interface uses voice commands, image-based instructions, and an inexpensive plastic scope to direct the user to place their eye within the view of the smartphone camera.
“By testing directly with older adults, we learned about ways to improve our system’s overall usability and even helped us innovate older-adult-specific solutions that make it easier for those with different physical limits to still use our system successfully,” said Edward Wang, PhD, a computer engineering professor. “When developing technologies, we must look beyond function as the only metric of success … [to] understand how our solutions will be used by end-users who are very diverse.”
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