Compensation, Restoration and Substitution.
Rehabilitation Of Vision Deficits
Visual field deficits after stroke or brain injury can be overlooked early on as more severe, and life-threatening, injuries sustained from the stroke or brain injury are treated. Patients should undergo a vision evaluation as soon as possible after their injury. Even if a patient does not perceive any problems with his or her vision, defects may be present, and they can have an extensive impact on the patient’s life and may affect other rehabilitation efforts.
Spontaneous Improvement And Recovery
Within three months of a stroke or brain injury, it is common for patients to experience some spontaneous improvement and occasionally full resolution of their visual field deficits. In other words, some vision difficulties will clear up by themselves. However, in many cases, spontaneous recovery is only partial and the remaining vision difficulties require therapeutic intervention.
Alternative Therapeutic Strategies
There are three main strategies for potential visual rehabilitation: Substitution, Compensation and Restoration.
NovaVision provides a portfolio of CE Marked therapy and diagnostic products focused on Compensation and Restoration. Vision Restoration Therapy (VRT) and NeuroEyeCoach are highly complementary restoration and compensation therapies, which NovaVision offers in a therapy suite providing broad benefits to patients. Neuro-Eye Therapy (NeET) is also a vision restoration therapy offered on its own.
What Is NeuroEyeCoach?
NeuroEyeCoach is designed to re-train the ability of a patient to scan the environment, re-integrate left and right vision and make the most of their remaining visual field. The program is self-adaptive and adjusts the task difficulty to the patient’s deficits and progress while encouraging eye movement efficiency. NeuroEyeCoach is supported by decades of clinical research and studies.
On a recently published three-center study it concludes that NeuroEyeCoach can be viewed as being the first evidence based gold standard registered medical device accessible to patients at home or in clinical settings.
Features:
- Designed to improve visual search performance, navigation and object finding skills
- Systematic training program with 12 levels of increasing difficulty, adapts to responses of patient
- Program is performed in the comfort of the patient’s home using their own computer
- Professional Models enable patients to perform program in-clinic under supervision, or at home monitored by therapist
- Designed to be relatively quick, be completed in 2-4 weeks
- Provided in a therapy suite with Vision Restoration Therapy
What Is Vision Restoration Therapy?
VRT is designed to restore vision loss due to neurological brain damage and is clinically supported through years of research and studies, including a 302 patient study in which notable improvements were seen in over 70% of the patients.
Features:
- Therapy is personalised for the vision deficit and updated monthly
- VRT does not require surgery or medication of any kind
- Therapy is done at home on the patient’s own computer and on their own schedule
- VRT uses light to stimulate the border between the seeing and blind areas
- Improvement does not depend on how long ago their vision loss occurred (Efficacy is independent of lesion age)
- Provided in a therapy suite with NeuroEyeCoach
What Is Neuro-Eye Therapy?
Like VRT, NeET is designed to restore vision loss due to neurological brain damage and is also clinically supported by scientific papers and many years of research carried out at the University of Aberdeen.
Features:
- The visual stimuli are customised to the area of damage for each individual and the program is interactive, adapting automatically as your visual sensitivity increases
- NeET is non-invasive, not requiring additional medication
- NeET uses object images to stimulate the border zone, moving deep into the blind zone over time
- Therapy is done at home on the patient’s own computer and to their own schedule
Vision Restoration Therapy
This type of therapy provides actual improvement in the range or sensitivity of the patient’s field of vision. NovaVision’s VRT uses repetitive light stimulation to activate impaired visual functions in areas of partial injury (“transition zones”), strengthening the residual vision and neuronal networks. The concept of repetitive stimulation has proven effective in the recovery of other functions such as movements of lower limbs after stroke. NovaVision provides its internet-delivered, at-home computer based VRT in a therapy suite with its complementary NeuroEyeCoach vision compensation therapy.
Neuro-Eye Therapy
NovaVision’s Sight Science NeET works on the basis that repeated stimulation of the blind or transition areas by specific spatial patterns can lead to increases in sensitivity of the blind areas, strengthening the residual vision and neuronal networks. Repetitive stimulation has proven effective in the recovery of other functions such as movements of lower limbs after stroke.
Vision Compensation Therapy
Using saccadic training, patients are trained to scan their surroundings rapidly and continuously in order to direct their gaze toward the blind field, bringing the previously unseen objects within their sighted field. NovaVision’s NeuroEyeCoach re-trains a patient to move their eyes effectively, re-integrate left and right vision and to make the most of their remaining visual field. NovaVision provides its internet-delivered, at-home computer based NeuroEyeCoach in a therapy suite with its complementary VRT vision restoration therapy as well as on its own.