Asmi Kumar

Cortical visual impairment (CVI), a prevalent vision disorder in young children, results from damage to the brain’s optic nerve or visual cortex, rather than the eyes. State-of-the- art therapy techniques involve training vision by tracking slow-moving, brightly colored objects, but are qualitative, subjective, and a huge caretaker responsibility. To help, I built FollowMe, a novel AI-powered web application providing free, at-home, individualized therapy and quantitative results tracking.

Capitalizing on peak neuroplasticity, FollowMe incorporates both patient and doctor views and implements a continuously self-calibrating gaze-tracking model via a laptop webcam, estimating error between patients’ scanpaths and true paths of objects being followed on a screen. Exercises with object color, size, speed, and shape personalizations are provided through a recommender model ingesting past session performances. A detailed patient dashboard with informative visualizations of progress history, enabling doctors to embed customizable exercises at specific points within therapy plans, has come to life.

Exciting human experimental results on FollowMe’s gazetracking accuracy across a wide depth range and the transferability of its calibration model were found. A Bluetooth-enabled hardware companion records and analyzes biometrics for anxiety anomaly detection, optimizing exercise recommendations. As telemedicine grows increasingly mainstream, FollowMe offers a powerful personalized solution to accelerate multi-year treatment timelines.