Originally published January 15 2006
Eye doctor finds way to make TV more enjoyable for patients with eye disease
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics (OPO) has published a study that details how one doctor discovered ways to make TV watching more enjoyable for the visually-impaired, which may soon lead to the development of a device that could benefit millions suffering from similar eye diseases.
A scientist at Schepens Eye Research Institute (SERI) found that increasing the contrast of details of certain sizes was of special importance in making television watching more enjoyable for the visually impaired.
"Most of us take seeing the television for granted," says Dr. Eli Peli, principal investigator of the study, senior scientist at SERI and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
As a low vision rehabilitation expert, Peli sees hundreds of patients suffering from vision impairments caused by diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy and other diseases that impair the central vision.
The goal of the current OPO study was to determine if people with impaired vision benefited from an individually tuned contrast enhancement of their TV.
Peli and his colleagues used an image-processing device developed for them by DigiVision Inc. that allows them to manipulate, in real time, the contrast of different sized details (or edges) in the video screen to their individual liking.
In the first part, 46 subjects with central vision loss were shown a series of still images and asked to find -- by moving a computer mouse on the table--a setting where the image was most visible.
Additionally some images were viewed at enhancement levels arbitrarily set to 4 different levels: smaller details enhanced with higher and with lowers contrast than the individual selection and larger details also at higher and at lower contrast.
Peli and his team found that patients did like the images that reflected their own individual settings for contrast and details better than the un-enhanced video.
However, personal preferences were only slightly higher for those individual settings than for the arbitrarily enhanced images.
Belkin, an international technology company, has recently released a video enhancement cable product, RazorVision, which enhances video for normal sighted TV viewers.
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