EyeBrain, a company that develops brain function markers for neurological and psychiatric conditions, announced the launch of a new application to measure eye movement disorders in children when reading. This new medical software, known as "Reading Application", enables specialists to automatically and quickly assess eye movement parameters in their patients when reading and in particular pinpoint disorders affecting the control of both eyes. This application could also be used to track the progression of eye movement disorders, guide orthoptic visual therapy and monitor the effects of this therapy.
 
Under normal circumstances, children should be capable of reading after two years in primary school. To have a disability, a child must have a reading age of at least 18 months behind his/her chronological age. Therefore, in theory, a reading disability cannot be diagnosed until year four of primary school.
 
With this application, EyeBrain provides medical professionals specializing in reading disabilities, including ophthalmologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, orthoptists, neuropsychologists and speech-language pathologists, with new brain function markers for reading. The two-minute eye movement examination can be used to accurately measure certain eye movement parameters during the reading process and thus help to detect these disabilities earlier.
 
Functional markers are analyzed during the examination by means of reading tasks and visual searching. This involves evaluating the time taken to complete tasks and measuring prosaccades, antisaccades and fixations, as well as the coordination of both eyes during saccades and fixations. A lack of coordination between both eyes is known as a disconjugate gaze. The capacity for coordination of both eyes is linked to convergence and divergence of eye movements and enables a stable gaze. The results are automatically analyzed and then presented in a medical report, which compares each of the markers analyzed to norms for children of the same age.
 
"Reading disabilities affect between 1 per cent and 15 per cent of children worldwide, depending on the study and the language spoken. Using the software developed by EyeBrain, we can introduce treatment at an earlier stage, therefore increasing its efficacy," explained Maria-Pia Bucci, research manager at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). "We recently published a study conducted with the Mobile EyeBrain Tracker (EBT) on the detection of disconjugate gazes in dyslexic children in PLoS ONE."
 
The research that has led to the development of this new product was conducted as part of a collaboration between EyeBrain, the CNRS and the Paris Descartes University, within the Robert-Debre Hospital, which is part of the Assistance Publique des Hopitaux de Paris (the public hospital system in Paris). The research was co-funded by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund.

"With this new patent-protected medical software unique to our company, EyeBrain has further increased its lead over its competitors in the field of clinical functional markers," said Serge Kinkingnehun, CEO of EyeBrain. "Thanks to our unique eye-tracking platforms for medical applications, we are able to offer brain function markers which can help in the early diagnosis and monitoring of many conditions."