Around one in 50 children are affected by the visual impairment amblyopia, which can usually be treated through patching therapy.
This involves the child wearing a patch over the unaffected eye – normally for three hours a day for six months – to force the 'lazy' eye to work.
However, the success rate is only 50 per cent, as children often struggle to wear the patch properly and with many busy households eventually giving up on the treatment.
Medics at the University of Southampton have joined up with mathematicians and game designers to create an app to encourage children to build a positive association with their eye patch and wear it more often.
The phone app consists of several different computer games designed by graduates of the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art working at Nucleolus Software, a company formed for the project.
Through complex programming, the app also uses the smart phone’s camera to check if the person...