A central-scotoma simulator based on low-cost eye tracker

Many ophthalmic diseases such as age-Related macular degeneration can lead to central vision loss. Loss of central vision can reduce some cognitive abilities like reading, driving or face recognition. Training brain can improve the cognitive ability of the people to use their peripheral vision. Researchers have difficulty in finding enough subjects who have central vision loss to ensure the validity of the experiment. Central-scotoma simulator (A software can simulate the dark spot of the central vision) can simulate the patient's vision by which can reduce the difficulty of finding the subject. In previous studies, the central-scotoma simulator based on eye tracker had proven to work well in some researches. This study has reduced hardware costs on the premise of ensuring software functionality and provided methodological support for the development of cognitive experiments about central vision loss. We completed three works to achieve our goal. Firstly, we explained the role of the central-scotoma simulator in scientific research about central vision loss. Secondly, we chose the suitable hardware and software to implement a low-cost simulator. Lastly, we used this simulator to simulate the symptom of patients with macular diseases, which resulted in the normal vision subjects achieved similar results same as macular degeneration in natural oral reading test.