Medical Invention in Your Hands

Smartphones today are moving from being monitored for their impact on mental health to a world of medical discoveries. Soon you will be able to screen yourself for neurological diseases, such as dementia and ADHD using just a smartphone!

Yes, you read the exactly right. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a new app that uses eye recordings to assess cognitive health. All you have to do is take a selfie of your eye to be diagnosed.

How Does the App Work?

The app closely tracks changes in pupil diameter through an eye-selfie test using two cameras, a near-infrared camera (included in most new smartphones), and a regular selfie camera, as these measurements can help assess a person's cognitive status. How? Pupil size gives insight into a person's cognitive functioning. For example, when a person is thinking seriously about a difficult mental task or hears an unexpectedly loud sound, the pupils dilate.

Here we turn to the mechanism of action of smartphone cameras that work in near-infrared rays in tracking the pupil; within the range of these rays, it is very easy to distinguish between the pupil and the iris, even in eyes with a dark iris. It is reported that this application is able to accurately calculate the size of the pupil of the eye (to less than a millimeter) regardless of the color of the eye.

Not Less Than the Gold Standard

After many experiments, this application proved its effectiveness in measuring the size of the pupil of the eye, as it gave measurements identical to those made by a device called the pupillometer, which scientists consider the gold standard for measuring the size of the pupil.

To ensure the success of this application, the researchers are working on making it usable for all age groups, as they are adding some features that make the application more user-friendly for the elderly.

The researchers will continue their work on this project and are now reported to be turning their attention towards enabling similar pupillary metric functions in older smartphone models.

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