Betasight Technologies

Betasight is developing a new use for VR, in ophthalmology, where VR headsets with eye-tracking are used to perform functional testing of eye health. Since the head mounted displays can generate everything a person can see the company is learning how they respond via eye-tracking. Glaucoma is the first target eye disease they are using their technology to test for. If detected early, treatments can slow disease progression.

BetaSight's founders Martin Sawtell and Corey Manders met in 2017, at Entrepreneur First in Singapore. They had computer vision and visual effects backgrounds and personal experiences with eye movement and vertigo and the development of software for ophthalmic devices.

The company uses off the shelf VR hardware along with established authoring tools and works with clinical partners to rapidly prototype and test diagnostic methodologies. Betasight is using machine learning techniques to optimize testing and find new diagnostic opportunities.

To take BetaSight's test, patients wear a headset and follow points of light with their eyes. Data collected is also used to train neural networks with the goal of enabling the system to make predictions based on eye movements, such as probability that the person has glaucoma, age-related macular degenertion, diabetic retinopathy or other diseases. Clinical trials are planned to evaluate the eye-tracking-based glaucoma test compared with existing diagnostic methods.