University of California San Diego are making it possible for people to screen for Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD and other neurological diseases and disorders from the comfort of their own homes.The app uses a near-infrared camera, which is built into newer smartphones for facial recognition, along with a regular selfie camera to track how a person’s pupil changes in size.
These pupil measurements can be used to assess a person’s cognitive condition, researchers said in a press release published on April 29.
Alzheimer’s research at University of Lethbridge gets huge funding boost “While there is still a lot of work to be done, I am excited about the potential for using this technology to bring neurological screening out of clinical lab settings and into homes,” said Colin Barry, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D.
student at UC San Diego and the first author of the research paper.“We hope that this opens the door to novel explorations of using smartphones to detect and monitor potential health problems earlier on,” he added.According to the researchers, pupil size can provide information about a person’s neurological functions.“For example, pupil size increases when a person performs a difficult cognitive task or hears an unexpected sound,” researchers said in the press release.