Hm, that's interesting. A lot of parkinson's related disease (different than schizophrenia, but still involving dopamine a lot) have eye movement findings that are pretty recognizable.
Culturally, not sure if psychiatrists are in the habit of examining eye movements as closely as, say, a neurologist or neuro-opthalmologist, but it'd be interesting if this is replicable by other groups.
It's only another tool in the diagnostic toolkit. My presentation is, um, "non-classical" to say the least (intentional tremor being, perhaps, the weirdest part of it) and arriving at a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease pretty much involved ruling out everything else that might have been causing my symptoms (which is a rather long process, all things considered). I've met dozens of people who I could have spotted as Parkinson's sufferers two blocks away at night during a blackout, and a few who, like me, seem to have a bespoke version that "isn't the other things" and responds to treatment for Parkinsonism. Well, as well as anything does, at least - meds are always a pretty blunt weapon and can't exactly track the body's own chemistry, so there will always be good periods, and under/over-medicated periods as well. When it comes to neuropathy - or normal functioning, for that matter - we're not quite stumbling around in the dark, but there's still one hell of a long way to go before we can say that we understand much about the machine.
In the near future most laptops will have the ability to do realtime eye tracking so these kinds of tests could be administered broadly, probably even through a web page.
how close are consumer eye tracking devices? It'd be interesting to see. My group works w/ the PD side of things, and doing a desktop-based eye test might be something we'd be interested in...
So I'd say all the pieces are in place to do this. The architectural design of the tobii and the leapmotion is almost identical. High frame rate cameras over USB3 illuminated with IR.
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Throw in an http://emotiv.com/ EEG and one could do all sorts correlations.
What I don't like about Emotiv is that external EEG is never that great - it only gets aggregate LFP's from signals from > 6 square cm of cortex at a time, and high frequency signals don't get through the bone and muscle. Still, data is data....and the sad part is neuro people have been looking at EEG for over a century and never really bothered to do real signals analysis on them...
Culturally, not sure if psychiatrists are in the habit of examining eye movements as closely as, say, a neurologist or neuro-opthalmologist, but it'd be interesting if this is replicable by other groups.