Rehabilitation at home for low-vision patients with pathologic myopia

Abstract

Purpose : Visual impairment is a chronic condition limiting many daily living activities as reading, writing and travelling. Low-vision services should provide innovative training programs to overcome the difficulties related to visual impairment including reaching the rehabilitation center. Tele-rehabilitation has been demonstrated to be a valid option to deliver rehabilitative care. EyeFitness (NIDEK Technologies Srl, Padua, Italy) (EF), is a new software device developed for achieving this goal, performing the visual training on the tablet or PC at home. The aim of our study was to evaluate the effectiveness of EF on a group of low vision patients suffering from pathological myopia.

Methods : Nine patients with pathologic myopia were selected for performing visual rehabilitation training at home with EF. The prescription defines the sequence and the repetitions of the 19 available exercises and, for each exercise, the set of parameters modeling the difficulty. Before starting with the home training the rehabilitator configured EF according to each patient visual functional characteristics. Home visual training was prescribed to each patient for a period of 10 weeks and consisted of 6 oculo-motor exercises. The clinician remotely verified the patient's compliance with the prescribed training. Reading speed, recognition accuracy, contour tracing correctness and reaction time were evaluated before and after the home rehabilitation with EF. Moreover, each patient underwent an usability test in order to assess the ease of use of EF.

Results : At the end of the training period, the average values of the considered evaluation parameters improved. In particular, the average reading speed increased from 45.6 ± 12.6 wpm to 71.1 ± 39.3 wpm. Accuracy, contour tracing correctness and reaction time improved from 56.9 ± 19.5% to 68.4 ± 18%, from 52.1 ± 21.4% to 78.6 ± 15.8%, and from 2.3 ± 6.5 s to 1.9 ± 7.3s respectively. The usability of EF was considered in the 78% of patients as “Good” and 22% as “acceptable”.

Conclusions : Results are encouraging, advocating that EF could be used for remotely delivering visual rehabilitation training to low-vision patients affected by pathologic myopia. Furthermore, patients themselves appreciated the tool’s ease of use. Further studies on the effectiveness of EyeFitness for other diseases are also in progress.

This is a 2020 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.

 

Example of available exercises

 

Clinician dashboard allows to monitor therapy progression