Visual problems assessment to improve quality of life

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WIVI is focused on children and teenagers, its products are aimed to improve public health evaluating and treating visual problems.

Visual dysfunctions can negatively impact the reading and comprehension capabilities of children, limiting professional and personal development. In Europe there are 152 million children at school age. Among them, approximately 30% suffer some kind of visual functional problem, yet only some of them are properly diagnosed and treated.

Many vision functional disorders may limit visual comfort in our daily activities such as deficiencies to align the eyes to an object of interest. A person with a convergence insufficiency, where nearby objects are in double vision, will have difficulty reading and understanding (this phenomenon is very common in adolescents). Furthermore, the lack of accuracy in the execution of the jumps eyes make during reading between letters and words, when uncoordinated or erratic, can limit learning how to read (very common in children) or limit the reading comprehension during learning (very common in adolescents). On the other hand, visuoperceptual skills are very important to identify and manage the information received by our brain. For example, a person experiencing directionality issues can confuse the direction of letters (“b” with “d” or “p” for “q”), which hinders or limits the understanding of a text.

95 to 100% of these cases can be assessed and improved using WIVI. This new system measures ocular parameters in real-time and in an objective way in order to minimize the subjectivity of the visual dysfunctions. After an initial assessment, training of visual function can be carried out in all altered areas at the same time, thanks to a custom therapy. Its contribution to the improvement in the quality of life for people with visual dysfunctions, as well as its potential impact on public health, has made WIVI earn international recognition. The system has been a European finalist at the IBM Watson Builder awards and the EIT Health Catapult, amongst others.