Measuring the Difficulty Watching Video With Hemianopia and an Initial Test of a Rehabilitation Approach

PURPOSE: If you cannot follow the story when watching a video, then the viewing experience is degraded. We measured the difficulty of following the story, defined as the ability to acquire visual information, which is experienced by people with homonymous hemianopia (HH). Further, we proposed and tested a novel rehabilitation aid. METHODS: Participants watched 30-second directed video clips. Following each video clip, subjects described the visual content of the clip. An objective score of information acquisition (IA) was derived by comparing each new response to a control database of descriptions of the same clip using natural language processing. Study 1 compared 60 participants with normal vision (NV) to 24 participants with HH to test the hypothesis that participants with HH would score lower than NV participants, consistent with reports from people with HH that describe difficulties in video watching. In the second study, 21 participants with HH viewed clips with or without a superimposed dynamic cue that we called a content guide. We hypothesized that IA scores would increase using this content guide. RESULTS: The HH group had a significantly lower IA score, with an average of 2.8, compared with 4.3 shared words of the NV group (mixed-effects regression, P < 0.001). Presence of the content guide significantly increased the IA score by 0.5 shared words (P = 0.03). CONCLUSIONS: Participants with HH had more difficulty acquiring information from a video, which was objectively demonstrated (reduced IA score). The content guide improved information acquisition, but not to the level of people with NV. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: The value as a possible rehabilitation aid of the content guide warrants further study that involves an extended period of content-guide use and a randomized controlled trial.