Ask any parent of a four-year-old with amblyopia about the eye patch, and you will hear the same story. Tears at breakfast. The patch ripped off at kindergarten. A bin full of adhesive strips that never lasted the prescribed two hours. For centuries, the treatment for lazy eye — a neural disorder affecting up to five percent of all children — has relied on covering the stronger eye and hoping the weaker one catches up. The logic is unimpeachable. The execution is a disaster. Compliance rates languish around 50 percent. Even among children who endure the ordeal, 40 percent never achieve normal vision, and more than a third of those who do improve will eventually regress.

The patch, in short, is a treatment that works in the consulting room but fails in the living room.

Clinicians who treat amblyopia know this frustration intimately. One US paediatric ophthalmologist described it as trying to reason with a four-year-old who does not want a patch over their eye while playing outside. Another, at the Children’s Eye Institute of Savannah, put it more bluntly: parents are desperate for any modern alternative. The problem is not that doctors lack effective therapies. It is that children — understandably — refuse to use them. When NovaSight, an Israeli startup, began enrolling patients who had previously failed traditional patching in its CureSight digital therapy programme, the clinicians involved reported something they rarely saw: children who actually wanted to do their treatment, and parents whose relief was palpable.

CureSight is one of a cluster of technologies emerging from Israeli startups that are reimagining amblyopia treatment from the ground up. Where patching shuts down one eye to train the other, these companies train both eyes simultaneously, exploiting the very binocular integration that amblyopia disrupts.

Developed by NovaSight, based at Airport City near Ben Gurion, the CureSight system........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)