Abstract
Purpose :
Reading difficulty is an important problem in visually impaired people. Recently, there are a lot of smartphone technologies to help improve reading performance in visually impaired people including OCR and TTS. But the real benefit of these technologies on quality of life is rarely studied. We have developed a smartphone app called “CU Eye Reader” with OCR and TTS to convert a photo with text into speech and read it out loud (Thai & English). We also study its usefulness for improving vision-related quality of life (VRQoL) in severe visually impaired people and the blind.
Methods :
11 patients aged 18-64 year with at least having severe visual impairment (BCVA range from 20/200 to hand motion in the better eye) were recruited and trained to use the CU Eye Reader app on their android smartphones. The Impact of Vision Impairment questionnaire (IVI) was used to evaluate VRQoL at baseline and at 4 weeks after install the CU eye reader app. The total duration of using the app per day, number of photos taken and converted to speech were recorded. The changes in the IVI score at 4 weeks were analyzed by paired t-test and Wilcoxon signed rank test.
Results :
The mean (SD) duration of daily app use was 21.81 (10.81) minutes. The overall IVI scores improved from a mean (SD) of 49.81(19.69) at baseline to 37 (16.26) at week 4, p= 0.004. The reading subscale scores of IVI improved from baseline mean (SD) 16.18 (5.28) to 10 (4.19), p= <0.001 at week 4. The mobility subscale scores also improved from 21.45 (7.5) to 16.81 (7.93), p= 0.024. No statistically significant change was found in mental health subscale scores of IVI (Table 1). 36.36% of subjects also reported being “very satisfied” and 63.64% of participants were satisfied with the CU Eye Reader application.
Conclusions :
Combination of OCR and TTS technology in smartphone app (CU Eye Reader) to convert a text photo to speech can improve the vision-related quality of life (IVI) in severe visually impaired and blind people. The OCR and TTS technology in mobile application seem to be a promising technology to assist severe visual impairment and blind people to be able to read independently. Further studies with larger sample size are needed to assess its further benefit.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.