Prolific participants enabled BioEye to develop a revolutionary app that safeguards brain health
BioEye is a startup developing brain health assessment software through easy-to-use eye-tracking technology. Their mission? To safeguard brain health with eye-tracking technology that sits in the palm of your hand.
The task
In this research, participants were shown a dot on their smartphone screen and asked to follow it using only their eyes. Using BioEye’s eye-tracking technology, the front camera on their phone would track the movement of their eyes. Analysis of the accuracy and responsiveness of this movement highlights any abnormalities that may need medical attention.
BioEye had two main objectives when embarking on this research. Firstly, to collect data to develop their machine learning algorithm. Data from participants without known impairments would allow BioEye to improve baseline accuracy. This healthy control data would then be used to develop a scoring AI that helps categorize new users as normal or abnormal based on their readings.
The second goal was to analyze how users responded to the app from a UX perspective. They wanted to identify areas of poor user compliance, and to use this data to develop UX and AI improvements to prevent these user errors. Part of BioEye’s mission is to make this technology accessible to everyone, so this goal was particularly important.
The challenge
Traditionally, research like this would take place in-person. However, in-person research would be expensive and difficult to scale for BioEye. They would also have to interview each individual to ensure they were right for the research, while making sure they were not inadvertently influencing them.
Seamless integration between platforms was critical. This research revolved around the use of BioEye’s app so the research provider had to be able to easily connect and work alongside the app.
Finally, BioEye needed easy and extensive filtering choices, particularly with medical data. It was integral that data quality was high and that participants were engaged throughout the exercise to ensure no incorrect readings from the eye-tracker.
The solution
After approaching several companies, BioEye ended up choosing Prolific.
Prolific’s interface was simple to use. It also integrated seamlessly with BioEye’s app.
BioEye was also highly impressed by Prolific's extensive filtering capabilities. This allowed BioEye to filter out any participants who had, for example, suffered a concussion or head injury. They then were able to create a pool of participants that did not have cognitive impairments.
The collection of data was also extremely fast.
Whereas other companies quoted up to 1 month to receive results, Prolific’s data collection was completed in one hour.
And the speed of data collection didn't sacrifice high data quality at any point during the study.
Usually when a startup is dealing with machine learning, the data is the main missing link and it’s really hard to get. [Using Prolific] helped hugely with this, and I’m counting on using Prolific in the future for more updates to our features.
The results
Apart from BioEye hitting its targets in gathering vital product validation and healthy population normal data, BioEye was able to use the Prolific tests to help understand usage and performance issues on specific devices.
Prolific shows the exact time that it takes participants to take a survey so BioEye could identify slower devices, and it allows participants to provide feedback. For example, this research showed that participants using the Samsung S21 were slower than others, a bug that BioEye was able to address after this research and before public release.
BioEye continues to update and optimize its algorithm with support from the Prolific platform, so it can refine its visionary eye-tracking technology.
