Visual Field Tracker started with a very personal question: How can I understand what is happening to my own visual field between one clinical examination and the next?
My name is Alessandro Miele. I have spent much of my professional life designing and building digital products.
I am also living with visual field loss.
Those two parts of my life eventually came together and became Visual Field Tracker.
From patient to inventor
Anyone who has undergone a standard visual field examination probably remembers the experience: sitting in front of the machine, keeping one eye covered, staring at a central point and pressing a button whenever a brief light appears somewhere in the field of vision.
The resulting map is extremely valuable to an eye-care professional.
As a patient, however, the first time a doctor told me I was losing my visual field, I couldn't believe it. I thought my vision was just fine. And that's because my brain was compensating the missing parts. At that point I wanted to explore my visual field myself.
But the way the standard clinical tests are performed was also fighting with another condition I have in my vision: the floaters. Not just a few spots that you can't really focus on because constantly escaping, but an incredible amount of them. So tight, so dense that essentially my vision is completely opaque. It's like I'm looking through a couple of glasses filled by sandy water.
So the clinical standard visual field test is a bit complicated: if the little light turns on just behind one of my biggest floater I don't see it.
I wanted to move a stimulus deliberately, approaching an area from different directions and understand where it disappeared and where it became visible again.
Most importantly, I wanted to repeat that exploration whenever I wanted and compare what I found with previous measurements.
So I built a small piece of software for myself.
The first Visual Field Tracker
The original version was supposed to be my own, personal, tool. But after using it repeatedly, it was clear that it could do much more:
A measurement made today can be compared with one made months earlier. Areas can be explored again. Patterns can be observed across multiple sessions.
That idea became the foundation of Visual Field Tracker.
Making an invisible problem visible
Visual field loss has another peculiar characteristic: it can be surprisingly difficult to explain.
When I look at your face close and I pay attention to your lips, I can't say if your eyes are closed or not...
That's typically what I kept saying to my friend, but while they might have made any imagination effort to understand, an image is better than a million of words,
This led to another experiment.
What if I could take the visual field I had recorded and apply it to a normal photograph?
The result became Vision Simulation.
Showing these simulations to other people often produced an immediate reaction:
"Wait... is that how you see? ...sh%%"
The simulation cannot reproduce exactly what another person experiences — human visual perception is far more complex than that — but it can turn an abstract visual field map into something much easier to understand.
That ability to communicate visual field loss became another important part of the project.
What Visual Field Tracker is — and what it isn't
Visual Field Tracker grew from my experience as both a patient and a software architect.
But it is important to be equally clear about what it is not.
Visual Field Tracker is NOT a medical test. It does NOT diagnose, treat, monitor or rule out glaucoma or any other medical condition, and it does NOT replace professional visual field examinations.
Visual Field Tracker DOES NOT REPLACE PROFESSIONAL VISUAL FIELD EXAMINATIONS
The application provides another way to explore, record and understand your own visual field perception.
If something you see in Visual Field Tracker concerns you — or if you notice any change in your vision — the right person to interpret that information is a qualified eye-care professional.
An evolving project
Visual Field Tracker is an evolving project. I will be happy to hearing from you and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
— Alessandro Miele Creator of Visual Field Tracker