Swedish technology to detect dyslexia early – Business Week

The method is based on more than 25 years of research on dyslexia and focuses on how dyslexia manifests itself in the eye movements – launch in Sweden takes place at the end of the year.

“There is no cure for dyslexia, but through early detection can be the right support deployed early so dyslexia does not become a limitation for the student’s educational opportunities, “says Gustaf Öqvist, Seimyr, he is a researcher at KI and co-founder of Optolexia.

Dyslexia affects learning in all school subjects negative, neurological causes and is characterized by difficulties with accurate and / or fluent word recognition and poor spelling and decoding abilities.

Optolexia state that every 15 children have dyslexia, which in round figures mean about 1-2 students per class. In addition to the human suffering is the social cost of several billion crowns.

A problem here is that many dyslexics first discovered in middle school or high school, which according Optolexia due to a lack of simple and effective methods for assessing literacy.

It is important to note that dyslexia is not a vision or eye movement problems but has to do with difficulties in brain decoding of the language’s phonetic structure, “says Mattias Nilsson Benfatto, researchers at KI and co-founder of Optolexia.

The company’s screening test takes less than a minute per pupil and the test can be carried out by the school or Optolexias staff.

Optolexia uses modern technology that measures the student’s eye movements when he read on a computer screen – the accuracy is around 95 percent both in terms of identifying and exclude dyslexia, according Optolexia.

The recorded eye movements are then analyzed in a cloud service where you can compare the student’s eye movement patterns with measurements of other children with and without dyslexia – the cloud service has been developed in cooperation with Microsoft . A web portal is that schools can take part of the results in a report for each student.

Optolexias goal is to offer schools the simple and effective tools already at an early stage to detect dyslexia and thus give more children opportunities to everything what the written word has to offer.

“With our screening method, we can identify more children already in primary school, so that they can get professional help far earlier than they receive today,” says Fredrik Wetterhall , President of Optolexia

The company’s founders are active at Marianne Bernadotte Centre, Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.

Their screening method currently being evaluated in a Vinnova-funded study under the program “Digitizing the school of the future”. The study also funded by Ingemar and Ulla Dahl’s Foundation and the Foundation Promobila.

The project involves Järfälla and Trosa and KI Innovation.

Approximately 1,500 students at 12 schools participated in the project over Spring.