Artificial intelligence for home monitoring devices

Home monitoring in ophthalmology is appropriate for disease stages requiring frequent monitoring or rapid intervention, for example, neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and glaucoma, where the balance between frequent hospital attendance versus risk of late detection is a constant challenge. Artificial intelligence approaches are well suited to address some challenges of home monitoring.

Ophthalmic data collected at home have included functional (e.g. perimetry), biometric (e.g. intraocular pressure), and imaging [e.g. optical coherence tomography (OCT)] data. Potential advantages include early detection/intervention, convenience, cost, and visual outcomes. Artificial intelligence can assist with home monitoring workflows by handling large data volumes from frequent testing, compensating for test quality, and extracting useful metrics from complex data. Important use cases include machine learning applied to hyperacuity self-testing for detecting neovascular AMD and deep learning applied to OCT data for quantifying retinal fluid.

Home monitoring of health conditions is useful for chronic diseases requiring rapid intervention or frequent data sampling to decrease risk of irreversible vision loss. Artificial intelligence may facilitate accurate, frequent, large-scale home monitoring, if algorithms are integrated safely into workflows. Clinical trials and economic evaluations are important to demonstrate the value of artificial intelligence-based home monitoring, towards improved visual outcomes.