$1m grant for child-friendly eye test tool

A team led by Auckland University researcher Jason Turuwhenua will tailor a device that could easily assess visual function in children as young as two years old.

Researchers aim to create device that will help detect vision problems in very young children.

Vision problems in young children could be picked up years earlier with technology being developed by University of Auckland researchers in a new million-dollar study.

A team led by Dr Jason Turuwhenua will tailor a device that could easily assess visual function in children as young as two years old.

Today there were few reliable and objective tests that clinicians could readily use to pick up and measure vision problems in young children.

"Testing vision in kids is challenging. One of the basic problems is very young kids simply don't comply with tests - they'll shuffle and move around a lot, basically get bored," Dr Turuwhenua said. "They may not have the language skills yet to read a standard vision eye chart as found in the doctor's office."

By the time children are old enough to read charts, the chances of successfully treating a vision problem had dwindled.

Undetected amblyopia, or lazy eye - the most common cause of poor vision in New Zealand children - could become permanent.

Another issue was that current exams weren't proving effective enough in diagnosis; one recent New Zealand study showed that 30 per cent of children aged between three and five years old who were referred for further testing didn't actually have vision problems.

Dr Turuwhenua's project, funded by an almost $1 million grant from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, would focus on detecting a giveaway eye movement that could be used to indicate visual function. This was the reflexive, involuntary eye movement called optokinetic nystagmus, or OKN.

"The presence or absence of the response can be used as a tell-tale sign of good or bad vision, and it's been established as such in clinical practice for a long time."

The diagnostic tool the researchers aimed to create would present young children with patterns that drifted across a screen before them, allowing doctors to quickly and easily assess their response with the aid of a computer-driven camera.

"The technology itself ... could be a handheld device that's the size of an iPad, or it could be something like a laptop. The key thing is that we get in nice and early and detect these problems - the younger we can do it, the bigger the gain."