A ground-breaking online web application created by UCL researchers promises to help people whose sight has been damaged by stroke to learn to read again.
A medical and technological collaboration between the UCL Institute of Neurology and UCL’s Multimedia team has developed ‘Read-Right’, a therapeutic website designed to help people with Hemianopic Alexia (HA) to improve and test their reading ability from their own homes.
HA damages a person’s sight, usually after a stroke or brain injury, and results in the loss of half of a person’s field of vision. This makes reading difficult and slow. Some people give up reading or even lose their jobs because they can’t read at a sufficient pace.
Read-Right enables people with HA to read scrolling text, which is easier to read than static writing on a page because it creates an involuntary eye movement. The therapy has been shown to improve a person’s ability to read normal text when used as part of a rehabilitation programme. Preliminary findings show that as little as 7 to 14 hours of therapy over several weeks could make reading easier for people with HA.
It also streamlines the current method of improving reading ability by enabling the exchange of audiovisual material and test results between the person with HA and the website, which offers clinical support.
This unique tool owes its development to an unusual collaboration between the Institute of Neurology, which provided the medical research and clinical expertise, and UCL Multimedia, which researched the technology and developed the software. The website was funded by the Stroke Association.
As well as Read-Right, the research team has recently released the second in the suite of therapies called… Eye Search. This is an online web therapy for people with ‘visual search’ problems caused by brain injury. Again funded by The Stroke Association, it is a clinically proven behavioural therapy designed to improve patients' speed and accuracy when finding objects. The team hope that it will improve patients' ability to navigate safely, with fewer collisions with objects or other people e.g. when walking outside.
Therapy Websites
Read-Right: http://www.readright.ucl.ac.uk
Eye-Search: http://www.eyesearch.ucl.ac.uk
Published Research Papers
Journal of Neurology: http://www.springerlink.com/content/y1830lu46gq82141
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry (BMJ): http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/early/2012/05/28/jnnp-2012-302270
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