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OcuSound: Enabling At-Home Glaucoma Monitoring in Low-Resource Settings
- Program: Biomedical Engineering
- Course: EN.580.497 Advanced Design Team
- Year: 2025
Project Description:
Glaucoma, the leading cause of irreversible blindness, disproportionately affects patients in low- and middle-income countries. Several factors contribute to vision loss, including lack of access to care, late-stage diagnosis, nonadherence to treatment, and inconsistent follow-up. Glaucoma is a chronic disease that requires constant monitoring and long-term management. Intraocular pressure (IOP) measurement is a primary means of monitoring glaucoma since IOP reduction is the only modifiable risk factor. Patients are currently reliant on periodic ophthalmologist visits to measure IOP, which prevents patients from properly monitoring their disease state and prevents ophthalmologists from making timely, fully-informed treatment decisions. OcuSound is an accurate, noninvasive tonometer that uses sound waves and the acoustic properties of the eye for self-monitoring of IOP. Designed for convenient, at-home patient use, this low-cost, intuitive device enables glaucoma patients to track a key metric in glaucoma care, increasing disease awareness and timely follow-up care to prevent glaucomatous vision loss.
Project Photo:
The team logo spells out “OcuSound” where a blue eye represents the letter “O”, highlighting the project goal: monitoring intraocular pressure (IOP). The image illustrates a person using the OcuSound acoustic tonometer, which consists of an ergonomic handle, elliptical body, and black eye-piece for comfortable daily IOP measurement.
Student Team Members
- Valerie Wong (Team Leader)
- Benjamin Miller
- HyunSeo (Emily) Lee
- Elliott Leow
- Nancy Yan
- Ashish Nalla
- Maria Giannakopoulos
- Ivan-Alexander Kroumov
- Kunal Parikh, Ph.D
- Ian Pitha, M.D., Ph.D
- Liz Ciociola, M.D.
- Eric Naviasky
- Swati U, DOMS, DNB
- S. Kavitha, MS
- R. Venkatesh, DO, DNB