Reading rehabilitation programme for macular degeneration patients
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The development of a reading rehabilitation programme for patients with age-related macular degeneration
IRAS ID
162612
Contact name
Stephen Anderson
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Aston University
Research summary
People who have macular degeneration (MD) often progress to a stage where they lose central vision. They have to rely on non-central (peripheral) vision to see. This makes many visual tasks, such as reading, much more difficult. Our goal is to develop a visual protocol that will enable MD patients to make more effective use of their peripheral vision for reading. While increasing text size to counter poor peripheral vision is an adequate approach for some, it provides only modest benefit for most. Moreover, larger fonts necessarily increase the number of eye movements needed for reading, making reading for pleasure difficult or impossible for most MD sufferers. Evidence is now emerging, however, that ‘crowding’ may be a major factor contributing to inefficient reading with peripheral vision. Crowding refers to the fact that a target (e.g. a letter or word) in peripheral vision is much harder to identify in the presence of nearby, flanking targets. Previous research has shown that increasing the space between text reduces the effects of crowding, affecting a doubling of reading speed in some patients. Importantly, recent research on both normally-sighted and amblyopic ('lazy eye') observers suggests that peripheral crowding may be further reduced following visual training on flanked letter identification tasks. The goal in this project is to assess reading performance in MD patients following perceptual training on flanked target (letter/word/sentence) identification tasks. We anticipate that the perceptual training will lead to a statistically significant increase in reading speed.
REC name
West Midlands - Solihull Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/WM/1125
Date of REC Opinion
30 Sep 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion