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 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 FDA registered 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.

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 and is registered with the FDA.

NeuroEyeCoach’s rehabilitation claims are based on the findings of numerous empirical studies and validated in a peer-reviewed clinical study published in Reed Elsevier’s Cortex, which demonstrated significant improvements in visual search with 87% improvements in search time and 80% of patients making fewer errors. This study confirms the prior NeuroEyeCoach study published in Biomed which concluded that NeuroEyeCoach could 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.

What is Vision Restoration Therapy?

VRT is the only commercially available FDA-cleared therapy designed to restore vision loss due to neurological brain damage.

VRT is a prescription therapy that 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 personalized 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.
  • Improvement does not depend on how long ago their vision loss occurred (Efficacy is independent of lesion age).

VRT-Child

Vision Compensation Therapy

Using saccadic training, patients are trained to rapidly and continuously scan their surroundings in order to direct their gaze toward the blind field, bringing the previously unseen objects within their sighted field. NovaVision’s NeuroEyeCoach retrains a patient to move their eyes, 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 it own.

Learn More About NEC

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.

Learn More About VRT