Biofeedback training of eye-blinking

Abstract

With the wide-spread use of the information display devices, the dry-eye symptom is increased through intensive observation of CRT screen. Since the dry-eyes may be developed through the absence of eye-blinking for a long time, except for certain pathological cases, it is intended to induce the eye-blinking by the biofeedback training. The eye-blinking interval increases with a visual task accompanying mental concentration is noted as a typical case. It is tried to recover the regular eye-blinking interval by feeding back the time elapsed from the last eye-blinking through a sound signal. Two kind of trainings were tried, i. e., the procedure where a sound is presented unless an eye-blinking does not occur within a specified time, as well as the procedure where the regular eye-blinking is learned through specified. The absence of eye-blinkings for longer than a preset time is used as the evaluation measure, and it is observed as the elongation of the eye-blinking interval can be prevented by either method, with a better result in the training by a musical rhythm. Thus, the proposed biofeedback training seems useful in preventing dry-eyes.