Jan 23 2025 17 mins 1
Scott Xiao, Co-Founder and CEO of Luminopia is developing a virtual reality-based treatment for amblyopia, also known as Lazy Eye in children. A traditional treatment is eye patching, which children find difficult to comply with. The Luminopia approach allows children to use a VR headset to watch content licensed from Sesame Street and Nickelodeon as a treatment to improve visual acuity by modifying the content presented to each eye. This FDA-approved VR-based medical treatment is an immersive environment that reduces distraction and enhances engagement so that children are more likely to comply with and complete treatment plans.
Scott explains, "We're pioneering a new class of treatments for a variety of visual conditions, and we're starting with a condition called amblyopia, which is more commonly known as Lazy Eye. And it's the number one cause of vision loss in children. And despite that, there hasn't been innovation in this space for a long time. Traditional treatment for amblyopia requires patients to wear glasses and then, in most cases, go through patching, which is exactly what it sounds like. You take an eye patch and stick it on your stronger eye for multiple hours daily."
"The product that we've developed, we like to say, allows patients to watch their favorite TV show as a treatment instead of having to wear a patch. The way that it works is that it's a virtual reality-based product. The kids put on a kid-friendly headset and can choose from more than 3,000 episodes of content that we've licensed from partners like Sesame Street and Nickelodeon. Once the child has chosen a video to watch, we modify how the images are presented to each eye with the goal of rebalancing the input to the brain and getting the brain to use both eyes together properly. We've shown that we can get significant vision improvement just by having patients watch TV for an hour per day."
"Certainly compliance is much easier with our product, and that's an important driver of outcomes. So we think that alone is an important advantage over what you could get with patching. The other important thing we've seen in our studies is that we can improve vision even in patients who have been through patching and failed patching. And that's a pretty big chunk of patients. Anywhere from 50% to close to 80% of patients that go through patching are still left with some amount of amblyopia. We've shown that our treatment works even in those patients, and we think it's because we're taking a different mechanism to treat the condition."
#Luminopia #Amblyopia #LazyEye #Healthtech #VRMED
