A better and an affordable diagnosis for vertigo

vertigo

Srinivas Dorasala, ENT surgeon, has handled several patients with problems of vertigo. He said that there is an underlying problem that causes vertigo. For the doctor to give a correct treatment, the underlying cause of vertigo has to be diagnosed.

Srinivas took an interest in vertigo when in college, he got to use a technology called videonystagmograpy (VNG), which is used to diagnose the cause of vertigo. VNG is used to test inner ear and central motor functions, which is a process called vestibular assessments. Patients wear special goggles and their eye movements are traced. The goggles were made by the French. It made a lot of difference while treating patients with vertigo and balance disorders.

According to Srinivas, the equipment was imported in small numbers, and there were issues regarding service and maintenance. To determine the cause of vertigo, this equipment is necessary, but it was expensive.

This left him and the other two co-founders, thinking about developing and building a home-made product that help diagnose the cause of vertigo using eye tracking and at the same time bring down the cost of the equipment. They formed Cyclops Medtech, and their product BalanceEye, has made diagnosis of various neuro-vestibular conditions easy and affordable.

Their idea was to build a product that will be much cheaper than the imported ones, be functional and have more features. The imported equipment that I was using had a one-eye imaging facility and had its limitations. They created the first three-camera device; two eye tracking cameras and one scene tracking camera.

“When the head moves, there is some amount of fluid movement in the inner ear. Inner ear fluid movement and eye movement are related. We can see the eye movement and say in what way the inner ear fluid is moving,” says Srinivas.

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Compared with Rs 20 lakh for an imported device, Cyclops’ device costs Rs 4.5 lakh. The company has sold their devices in India, Jeddah, Oman and the Philippines. Cyclops is now working on a device for detecting stroke.