Home Business Colorblindness Exam Gets a Kid-Friendly Makeover

Colorblindness Exam Gets a Kid-Friendly Makeover

by Bioreports
108 views
colorblindness-exam-gets-a-kid-friendly-makeover

Open a copy of the new picture book “The Curious Eye” and you might see birds resting in trees, dolphins swimming among schools of fish and monkeys swinging through a jungle canopy.

Or you might not.

The book is a screening tool for color vision deficiency, colloquially known as colorblindness, a condition that prevents one in 12 males and one in 200 females from seeing a full spectrum of color. Some children will struggle to find its animals hiding among a sea of dots, indicating to parents, teachers and pediatricians that they might by colorblind.

The book, from the San Francisco-based Children’s Eye Foundation, is one of several projects aiming to make the color-perception exam more accessible and engaging to children. The standard assessment asks people to look at a series of colored dots and describe the number they can see among them, if they can see one at all. It is named after its creator, Japanese ophthalmologist Shinobu Ishihara.

The traditional Ishihara test for colorblindness involves spotting numbers among a group of dots.



Photo:

SSPL/Getty Images

“The Ishihara test has been in existence for over 100 years now, but it’s just not widely available and it’s not fun,” said Kristen Barbarics, executive director of development at the Children’s Eye Foundation, part of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus. The test is also ineffective for children who haven’t learned their numbers yet, she said.

“The Curious Eye” was developed by Klick Health, part of Toronto-based digital marketing company Klick Inc. Kristine Brown, a copy supervisor at Klick Health, was researching color vision deficiency when she discovered that her brother-in-law was diagnosed as colorblind only at the age of 16.

The diagnosis came after years of confusion and frustration, according to Ms. Brown. Her brother-in-law told her that when he was a young student, he filled in his drawings of snowmen with what teachers called the wrong color, which they interpreted as a sign of depression, she said.


Newsletter Sign-up

The Experience Report

Get weekly insights into the ways companies optimize data, technology and design to drive success with their customers and employees.


Many U.S. states don’t test kindergarten-age children for color vision deficiency the way they test for visual acuity, or how well they can see, said Gavin J. Roberts, a partner at the Midwest Eye Institute and clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, who advised Klick on the development of “The Curious Eye.” A colorblindness test isn’t usually offered as part of a routine eye exam unless it is requested, he added.

The Children’s Eye Foundation hopes the book will raise awareness of colorblindness and will act as a sort of steppingstone between ignorance of color vision deficiency and a child’s official diagnosis, Ms. Barbarics said.

The last pages of the book direct adults to a website where they can learn more about the condition and schedule a clinical test, though the book itself isn’t designed to officially diagnose a child, Klick Health said.

In the U.K., academics are working on something more diagnostic. The University of Sussex’s Baby Lab, which investigates how babies and toddlers perceive and understand color, has developed an iPad app to test for color vision deficiency in young children in an engaging way.

ColourSpot, an iPad game developed by academics at the University of Sussex, asks children to press the colored spots they can see.



Photo:

Sussex Baby Lab

The free app, called ColourSpot, features animal protagonists such as a friendly monkey who asks children to tap colored spots that appear on a gray background alongside other grayscale spots.

At the end of the five-minute game, ColourSpot will email factsheets about the condition to the parents or teachers of children it considers to be colorblind.

Anna Franklin, professor of visual perception and cognition at the University of Sussex and one of the game’s creators, said the team aims to introduce the app to schools and eye-care professionals once it has been approved by British regulators as a medical device, she said. The hope is that the approval comes within a year, she added.

Like the U.S., the U.K. doesn’t routinely screen young children for color vision deficiency.

“ColourSpot doesn’t cost anything, you don’t have to buy any specific tests and you don’t have to get a specialist optometrist to come and do the testing,” Prof. Franklin said.

More From the Experience Report

Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

You may also like

Leave a Comment