Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a smartphone app which could allow people to screen for Alzheimer’s, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other neurological disorders, with a simple closeup recording of their eye.
Using a near-infrared camera, which is built into newer smartphones for facial recognition, along with a regular ‘selfie’ camera, the app can track changes in pupil size with sub-millimetre accuracy across various eye colours. During testing, the app’s measurements were comparable to those taken by a pupillometer. These measurements could be used to assess a person’s cognitive condition, explained lead author Colin Barry, an electrical and computer engineering PhD student at UC San Diego.
Designed and tested for remote research with older adults, the app uses high-visual contrast and easy navigation including voice commands and visual cues to support self-administration. “While there is still a lot of work to be done, I’m excited about the potential for using this technology to bring neurological screening out of clinical lab settings and into homes. We hope this opens the door to novel explorations of using smartphones to detect and monitor potential health problems earlier on.”
The development of this tool could have a huge public health impact, said Dr Eric Granholm, a psychiatry professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “A scalable smartphone assessment tool that can be used for large-scale community screenings could facilitate the development of minimally invasive and inexpensive tests to aid in the detection and understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s.”
Read the paper here.
