PlayEye: Toy for Preventing Child Myopia

Are you aware of the serious issue of child myopia? Childhood is a crucial period for visual development, yet as of 2021, the prevalence of myopia in children reached a staggering 75.2%. Research suggests that regular eye exercises are effective in preventing myopia. However, encouraging children to voluntarily engage in eye exercises is challenging. That’s why we’ve developed PlayEye, a myopia prevention toy that allows kids to naturally exercise their eyes through play.

PlayEye offers three eye exercise modes for myopia prevention and one touch mode for fine motor development. Beyond eye exercises, we incorporated playful elements to make it enjoyable to children.

In the eye modes, children extinguish lights on the pad by looking towards the illuminated direction. Our gaze tracking algorithm confirms the alignment of gaze and pad direction. When matched, the light on the pad goes out, and the process repeats for the next pad.

This method encourages ocular exercise, aiding in myopia prevention. PlayEye defaults to an OFF mode and allows mode selection by turning the handle. Round mode strengthens convergence muscles, eight mode is known for effective myopia prevention, and there’s a Saccade-based shift mode.

In addition to eye modes, PlayEye features a touch mode for cognitive and fine motor development. In this mode, lights on animal-shaped pads prompt children to press the corresponding pad to turn off the light.

Below is excerpts from our project presentation explaining the gaze tracking algorithm and 4 different modes of PlayEye. The left also features our software UI which explains the internals of our toy.