Despite the availability of effective treatments, glaucoma remains the leading cause of irreversible blindness among African Americans (and second overall) in the U.S.. Three million Americans currently live with glaucoma, and it will rise to 7.3 million by 2050 as our population ages. Non-adherence to daily eye drop medications – the treatment for 89% of glaucoma patients – is a key modifiable driver of vision loss in glaucoma. Glaucoma patients do not use the drops as scheduled at least 40% of the time and 20% of patients do not successfully instill the drop into their eyes. In order to reduce glaucomatous vision loss, there is a critical need to monitor medication use, communicate usage data to the patient’s health care team, and coach patients on how to use their eye drop medications. Our current work is focused on quantifying the biomechanics of eye drop use and developing new technologies to quantify eye drop use.
Data from wearable sensors and an instrumented bottle enables calculation of biomechanical metrics and metrics that describe the use event, including the duration of the instillation, steadiness of the bottle during instillation, and the smoothness of bottle movement.