Visual field loss compensation for homonymous hemianopia patients using edge indicator

Homonymous hemianopia (HH) is one kind of visual field defect that the right or left half of the visual fields of both eyes are missing. HH is caused by damage to the neural pathways of the brain and a complete recovery is usually difficult. This study proposes a new information compensation method for HH patients using optical-see-through head mounted display. To avoid causing the occlusion, the proposed technique uses indicators placed at the boundary between the lost and remaining sides of visual field to notify patients about the changes in the lost side. Experiment involving simulated HH participants was conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and compare with the existing method using overlaid overview window. Objective and subjective evaluation results show that the proposed method can partially alleviate the occlusion problem of overlaid overview window approach and has lower physical and mental demand.