A smartphone app that turns vision tests into puzzle games will use artificial intelligence to spot the earliest signs of macular disease from home, before a person notices anything wrong. Macular disease is the leading cause of blindness in the UK, and half of all cases are avoidable with early treatment. But current monitoring relies on hospital visits and the standard eye chart, which was designed for prescribing glasses and is poor at detecting early disease or tracking its progression. Patients often wait too long for appointments, and stretched eye clinics cannot prioritise those who need urgent care. If this AI works, patients will play short games on their own phone for a few minutes each day. The app measures subtle changes in visual function that signal disease worsening, and the AI flags those changes to clinicians. This shifts monitoring from hospital to home, frees up specialist appointments for the people who need them most, and catches deterioration early enough to treat it. The team is training the algorithm on real-world smartphone data paired with clinical decisions from NHS hospitals in Nottingham and Oxford, and working with the Macular Society to ensure the interface is usable for older patients.
View original technical description
OKKO Health is a software medical device company developing companion apps for people with chronic eye disease. The app consists of short games which use vision science technology to measure visual function through the data produced. This project is to develop an AI product to identify the very early visual symptoms indicative of either development or worsening of macular disease by using smartphone data only, so that vision assessment and monitoring can be shifted from the hospital to the home and so that in-person appointments with hospital eye specialists can be prioritised for those who need them. This will enable personalised eye care; leading to more efficient use of limited highly pressurised resources and optimise vision outcomes for patients through early and prioritised treatment (currently, 50% of UK blindness is avoidable with early treatment). OKKO's core work has been highly innovative, because unlike others, they do not simply replicate the eye chart onto a phone screen. This is because the eye chart was designed for prescribing accurate glasses, and it is very poor at picking up early eye disease, or monitoring progression of eye disease. Instead, OKKO's team translate aspects of established vision science currently contained in expensive equipment into accessible, straightforward puzzle games on a smartphone/tablet so that hospital-grade measurements can be gained at home. This project will use real-world smartphone data to create the AI algorithm trained by high-quality clinical decisions from the doctors in Nottingham and Oxford NHS and international sites. We will work with the University of Bristol and the Macular Society charity to make the smartphone AI's interface with patients user-friendly and meaningful.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know