| dc.description.abstract | Eye diseases are highly prevalent in Uganda. If left untreated, these diseases usu ally lead to bilateral visual impairment or blindness. In fact, 0.19% of Uganda’s
population is blind, and 1.1% of the population has moderate to severe blind ness. Common conditions in Uganda include cataract, refractive error, macular
degeneration, glaucoma, and corneal opacity. Unfortunately, Uganda does not
have enough ophthalmologists (1 per 1 million) and screening equipment for
diagnosis of eye diseases. Most diagnostic exams are manual and rudimentary.
Therefore, some conditions remain undetected and potentially escalate.
To address this need, our work focused on development of a low-cost electro oculogram (EoG), a device that can be used to investigate abnormalities of the
retina (both the outermost layer and the retinal pigment epithelium), allow ing diagnosis of macular diseases.) We designed and built the hardware for
the system. This was followed by implementation of an algorithm for noise
removal from the EoG signal and an algorithm for diagnosis of disease based
on eye movement and the Arden ratio. We then integrated the hardware and
software components into a functional prototype and evaluated the system on
healthy volunteers. We compared our results to results expected from Optical
Coherence Tomography for healthy individuals, obtained from literature. In our
future work, we will improve our system design and undertake clinical validation
of the system. | en_US |
