Helping Dyslexics
in the Blink of an Eye 
State-of-the-art
warplane cockpit systems that allow pilots to aim missiles with their eyes are
being adapted by defence researchers and Oxford University scientists to help
diagnose dyslexia by measuring whether children's eyes work properly when they
read. The diagnosis
kit - designed to measure "eye wobble", one of the key components of dyslexia
- uses two tiny video cameras fixed to a pair of spectacle frames. These contain
reflective glass, like that used in one-way mirrors. When children put on the
glasses and look towards a fixed point or a moving target, the cameras film their
eye movements, which are measured with infrared light reflected by the glass.
A computer link
then shows whether the child's eyes are fixing and tracking steadily, or whether
they wobble. Eye
wobble can be catastrophic for young readers. Eight-year-old Alex Ing, for example,
had "absolutely chaotic" eye movement when he visited Dr Sue Fowler at the Dyslexia
Research Trust (DRT) clinic in Oxford. Despite
extra help at school and tests by an educational psychologist, nobody could discover
why Alex, who scores above average on IQ tests, was failing to read. Using
existing techniques, Fowler found that, like many children, Alex could not fix
his eyes for the fleeting second needed to read words, nor could he move his eyes
steadily along a line of text. The words were a flickering jumble of letters to
him, which was why he was frustrated, working hard, but still with a reading age
18 months behind where it should have been. Six
months later and Alex's reading age has caught up. His success is due to daily
eye exercises prescribed by Fowler. John
Stein, professor of neurology at Oxford University, who with Fowler studies hundreds
of children a year in the DRT clinic, believes that more than half of dyslexic
children may have eye control problems. Some can be helped with exercises, others
simply by putting a patch over one eye to stop their eyes competing to take the
lead. Many improve with coloured glasses, which boost the contrast between the
words and the page. Should
QinetiQ, the defence research agency, manage to bring the military's kit into
commercial production in the next few years, it will make it much easier for opticians
or specialist teachers to see at once whether a child is failing to read because
of eye wobble and to prescribe exercises or glasses. It
will also show if a child has normal vision, in which case teachers and parents
can then focus on the child's difficulties in understanding the relationship between
the sounds and shapes of letters - the other key feature of dyslexia.
But whatever the cause,
says Stein, the key factor in whether dyslexic children succeed at school is the
age at which they are diagnosed and helped. It is vital they are caught young.For
eye-training exercises, "ideally, you want to catch them by the age of eight".
For help with letter-sounds,
research shows that "early intervention is roughly 10 times as effective as intervention
later on", says Rod Nicolson, professor of psychology at Sheffield University.
With many thanks to the consistently reliable
source of news - The
Sunday Times (October 28th 2001). 
Today's news from
The
Sunday Times. | 
