Projects

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This collaborative project between Smith-Kettlewell and the San Francisco LightHouse applies Smartpen-Based audio/tactile graphics tools to improve orientation and wayfinding by travelers with visual disabilities in and around unfamiliar transit stations.

overTHERE is a virtual Talking Signs iPhone app for blind and visually-impaired pedestrians that demonstrates a powerful audio/haptic interface to location information about businesses and other points of interest.

The ability to navigate safely and confidently is a fundamental requirement for independent travel and access to many settings such as work, school, shopping, transit and healthcare. Navigation is particularly challenging for people with visual impairments, who have limited ability to see signs, landmarks or maps posted in the environment.

Individuals with strabismus are confronted with double vision, their brain has to choose to attend to one image and ignore or suppress the other. It has been commonly suggested that a constant suppression on the non-preferred eye in strabismus is responsible for the development of amblyopia. In the current project, we study the role of top-influences of attention in amblyopic suppression and test the hypothesis that visual suppression in amblyopia may be a form of long-term attentional “neglect”.

The goal of this project is to test a hypothesis that whether or not training patients to pay more attention to the input from the amblyopic eye can overcome interocular suppression to treat amblyopia.

Fellow eye abnormalities have been reported in a number of psychophysical and VEP studies. The goal of this project is to characterize the fellow eye deficits.

This project was to measure the neural correlates of grouping and perception in different types of amblyopia. We found that strabismus generates significant abnormalities at both early and later stages of cortical processing and, importantly, that these abnormalities are independent of visual-acuity deficits