Publication date: 
2017/01/02
The diagnosis of severe mental and developmental disorders and diseases, as well as an effective means of communication for the disabled. Al this is possible by the device that is able to detect even the smallest eye movements. It was developed by researchers from the Department of Economics, Management and Humanities of Faculty of Electrical Engineering under the direction of Ing. Martin Dobiáš, PhD., within the project "Monitoring eye movements for diagnosis in neuroscience." The research was financially supported by Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TA CR) under the ALFA program, supporting applied research and experimental development.

In the project, researchers focused on sexual deviants, various forms of schizophrenia and developmental dyslexia. Using special software and appropriate hardware equipment, doctors from the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital have had opportunity to successfully conduct research of eye movements of test subjects in response to presented visual stimuli. Moreover, a pilot study was conducted exploring other possible application areas, such as technology usability for people addicted to alcohol, pathological gamblers and effect of depressant drugs on behavior of individuals.

Due to the large amount of data from different areas that scientists collected during the project, it will be possible to verify a number of hypotheses and refine and further develop diagnostic methods that can help with treatment of serious mental illness in the next few years.

The extremely important and beneficial project was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic with over 12.7 million Czk. According to the first results, the tool for diagnosis through eye movement tracking, has considerable potential in many fields, ranging from medicine to scientific and industrial sectors.

Websites Novinky.cz, Denik.cz, Chip.cz, Computerworld.cz, and Technickytydenik.cz informed about the project.