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Friday, March 20, 2015

What can your eyes reveal?

Technion: The Eyelid Motion Monitor (EMM) developed at Technion’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering has entered the clinical trials phase. The goal: to be used in the diagnosis of different diseases based on eyelid movement.

“Eyelid motion provides us with meaningful information about the health status of a patient,” explains student Hanuka. “It can indicate, for example, neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and autoimmune diseases such as Graves’ disease... We developed a device that can be installed on standard refraction glasses used in eye tests.”
Both hardware and software systems are installed on these glasses to detect the wearer’s eyelid movements, and interpret them according to the magnetic field generated by two tiny magnets fitted on the upper eyelids. The EMM project is conducted at the High Speed Digital Systems Laboratory (HS-DSL) located in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering; the software (Eyelidpro) was developed by two electrical engineering students. Today, as part of her doctorate with Prof. Schachter, she is developing tiny optical radiation devices for cancer therapy. “Existing devices operate on energy from big and expensive accelerators, and this radiation also damages healthy tissue. Our vision is to develop a compact accelerator that would be relatively inexpensive and which could be employed also in small clinics, with a capacity for direct targeted radiation to the tumor site.”