Abstract
Purpose :
Patients implanted with a retinal prosthesis using an external camera can misjudge the location of an object when the patient’s line of sight is different from that of the camera. We investigated whether the accuracy of the reaching movement is improved if the image of an external camera is aligned to the direction of patient’s line of sight.
Methods :
Ten right eyes of 10 healthy Japanese subjects (7 men, 3 women; 24-40 years) with the left eyes shielded carried out the localization test. They wore a head-mount display (Arrington Research) with an artificial retina simulator (NIDEK, prototype) and a line-of-sight feedback system. A 5° white square was displayed on a PC monitor at random positions, and subjects were instructed to touch the center of the target. The distance between the touched position and the center of a target was calculated automatically. The localization test was performed with and without editing the position of the image of the external camera. The trial was repeated 20 times. We compared the average deviation of all subjects with or without gaze feedback.
Results :
The deviation was significantly smaller at 9.2±2.8° with gaze feedback than the 14.5±2.9° without gaze feedback (P<0.001, paired t test).
Conclusions :
The significantly better accuracy of the reaching movement in subjects worn retinal implant simulator with a gaze feedback system indicates that a gaze feedback system should be incorporated into the prosthesis system with external camera.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.