'Eye-catching' smartphone app could make it easy to screen for
neurological disease at home

Date:
April 29, 2022
Source:
University of California - San Diego
Summary:
Researchers have developed a smartphone app that could allow people
to screen for Alzheimer's disease, ADHD and other neurological
diseases and disorders -- by recording closeups of their eye. The
app uses a smartphone's built-in near-infrared camera and selfie
camera to track how a person's pupil changes in size. These pupil
measurements could be used to assess a person's cognitive condition.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a smartphone app that could allow people to screen for Alzheimer's disease,
ADHD and other neurological diseases and disorders -- by recording
closeups of their eye.


==========================================================================
The app uses a near-infrared camera, which is built into newer smartphones
for facial recognition, along with a regular selfie camera to track how
a person's pupil changes in size. These pupil measurements could be used
to assess a person's cognitive condition.

The technology is described in a paper that will be presented at the
ACM Computer Human Interaction Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI 2022), which will take place from April 30 to May 5 in New
Orleans as a hybrid-onsite event.

"While there is still a lot of work to be done, I am excited about the potential for using this technology to bring neurological screening out of clinical lab settings and into homes," said Colin Barry, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego and the first author of
the paper, which received an Honorable Mention for Best Paper award. "We
hope that this opens the door to novel explorations of using smartphones
to detect and monitor potential health problems earlier on." Pupil size
can provide information about a person's neurological functions, recent research has shown. For example, pupil size increases when a person
performs a difficult cognitive task or hears an unexpected sound.

Measuring the changes in pupil diameter is done by performing what's
called a pupil response test. The test could offer a simple and
easy way to diagnose and monitor various neurological diseases and
disorders. However, it currently requires specialized and costly
equipment, making it impractical to perform outside the lab or clinic.



========================================================================== Engineers in the Digital Health Lab, led by UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Edward Wang, collaborated with researchers
at the UC San Diego Center for Mental Health Technology (MHTech Center)
to develop a more affordable and accessible solution.

"A scalable smartphone assessment tool that can be used for large-scale community screenings could facilitate the development of pupil response
tests as minimally-invasive and inexpensive tests to aid in the detection
and understanding of diseases like Alzheimer's disease. This could have
a huge public health impact," said Eric Granholm, a psychiatry professor
at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the MHTech Center.

The app developed by the UC San Diego team uses a smartphone's
near-infrared camera to detect a person's pupil. In the near-infrared
spectrum, the pupil can be easily differentiated from the iris, even in
eyes with darker iris colors.

This enables the app to calculate pupil size with sub-millimeter accuracy across various eye colors. The app also uses a color picture taken by the smartphone's selfie camera to capture the stereoscopic distance between
the smartphone and the user. The app then uses this distance to convert
the pupil size from the near-infrared image into millimeter units.

The app's measurements were comparable to those taken by a device called
a pupillometer, which is the gold standard for measuring pupil size.

The researchers also included various features in their app to make it
more user friendly for older adults.



==========================================================================
"For us, one of the most important factors in technology development is
to ensure that these solutions are ultimately usable for anyone. This
includes individuals like older adults who might not be accustomed to
using smartphones," said Barry.

The researchers worked with older adult participants to design a simple
app interface that allows users to self administer pupil response
tests. This interface included voice commands, image-based instructions,
and a cheap, plastic scope to direct the user to place their eye within
the view of the smartphone camera.

"By testing directly with older adults, we learned about ways to
improve our system's overall usability and even helped us innovate older
adult specific solutions that make it easier for those with different
physical limits to still use our system successfully," said Wang, who is
also a faculty member in the UC San Diego Design Lab. "When developing technologies, we must look beyond function as the only metric of success,
but understand how our solutions will be utilized by end-users who are
very diverse." The Digital Health Lab is continuing this work in a
project to enable similar pupillometry function on any smartphone rather
than just the newer smartphones.

Future studies will also involve working with older adults to evaluate
home use of the technology. The team will work with older individuals
with mild cognitive impairment to test the app as a risk screening tool
for early stage Alzheimer's disease.

This work was funded by the National Institute of Aging.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_California_-_San_Diego. Original written by Liezel
Labios. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Colin Barry, Jessica de Souza, Yinan Xuan, Jason Holden, Eric
Granholm,
Edward Jay Wang. At-Home Pupillometry using Smartphone Facial
Identification Cameras. CHI '22: CHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems, 2022 Proceedings, 2022 DOI:
10.1145/3491102.3502493 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220429144904.htm

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