As many of you may know, after stroke, I was left with visual and spatial challenges that I have attempted to rehabilitate in many ways and never stopped exploring these methods to, hopefully, one day make life less like an apple bobbing around in a barrel. Recently, I have been teaming up taVNS with saccade training with the desire to emulate the training recently undertaken by the NHS with taVNS and spasticity which has proven some good results so far. Not sure how it will translate with visual-spatial and neuro pathways, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I’ve been testing out many apps available on the Mac OS App Store and I thought I ought to start a thread, sharing them with folk here so that those who may benefit can have the wheat separated from the chaff by me, and have the benefit of looking before leaping, so to speak.
There are a lot of guff apps on the App Store and trialing them can be a trial in itself. I test apps that are free or have a freemium component, I won’t pay out for something direct unless it has been recommended elsewhere as you just don’t know what you are getting half the time and some are click bait or pocket crooks.
Many apps are just guff. They have exercises such as blinking which does little for brain to eye muscle connections aside from giving the eyes a good wash or eye massaging which may feel pleasant but that is about the extent of any benefit from doing this. Some apps have naff games that are little more than just puzzlers to past the time. Some apps state being free and then as soon as you have created an account, they request a subscription fee and some apps are so littered with advertising that you may as well be rehabilitating your dismay at the sheer invasiveness of enshittification.
The first app I would like to share is simply called Eye Training Tool, it is developed by Shanghai Liaoxing Tech and claims to be neuro-science based vision training, which is a good start. First impressions, the app has a bit of a fiddly layout but the GUI (Graphical user interface) is clean and simple.
As you can see, on the right of this screenshot, there are lots of visual training exercises and with some patience, you can change the colours of the focal point and invert the whole interface from either black or white. The app is listed as medical without a purchase needed to use it, and it has no subscription cost or pervasive advertising, thus making it my top app pick for visual training. Who knows how long this will last, but hopefully it will stay that way as I find commercialisation of disability a bit irksome in some cases. There are no timers or sounds, so it is an app without the whistles and bells, but this is okay, considering the amount of training exercises available.
So, until next time I feel the hwyl to write a visual training app review on this thread, I hope this is a decent start and if anyone has their own visual training app on Mac OS or android, feel free to mention it here and I’ll look into it and give it my honest opinion.