Friday 16 January 2015

EyeSearch paper published


Results of a study using the free web-based therapy EyeSearch (www.eyesearch.ucl.ac.uk) have recently been published in the journal "Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology", a bit of an obscure journal admittedly.  The researchers found that the method improved the time taken to find objects on a visual search task.


Participants were self-screened online and those with neglect were excluded.  Hemianopia was demonstrated using an online visual field test designed by the researchers.

The results are made more convincing by the fact that patients reported improvements on some activities in their daily lives but not others.  Those that improved were those that perhaps involve more visual search: shopping, collision avoidance and finding things.

The paper can be found by following this link.

The graph below shows how search time reduced over time (3 time points) during the study:

The graph below shows how patient-reported tasks improved over time (3 time points as above).  Those in red improved, those in blue didn't:


The "proof-of-principle" paper that initially tested the "Ramp-Step" method of visual search training was published in Cortex in 2013.  Follow this link to the paper (abstract free, login required for full text).


FEATURED

Try Eye-Search, free web-based visual search training from University College London (funded by the Stroke Association).
Listening Books is a UK charity providing audiobooks for people with reading difficulty. Books can be posted on CD, downloaded, or streamed online. There is a membership fee, but it is apparently heavily subsidised.