The eyes aren’t only a window into the soul; tracking saccades may also help doctors pick up a spread of brain health issues. That’s why French-Belgian medtech startup neuroClues is constructing accessible, high-speed eye-tracking technology that comes with AI-driven evaluation. It desires to make it easier for healthcare service providers to make use of eye tracking to support the diagnosis of neurodegenerative conditions.
The corporate is starting with a give attention to Parkinson’s disease, which already typically incorporates a test of a patient’s eye movement. Today, a physician asks a patient to “follow my finger,” but neuroClues wants clinicians to make use of its proprietary, portable headsets to as a substitute capture eye movements at 800 frames per second, after which they’ll run an evaluation of the info in only a number of seconds.
The three.5-year-old outfit’s founders — two of whom are neuroscience researchers — point to high rates of misdiagnosis of Parkinson’s as certainly one of the aspects informing their decision to give attention to the disease first. But their ambitions do pan wider. They paint an image of the longer term by which their device becomes a “stethoscope for the brain.” Imagine, for instance, in case your annual trip to the optician could pack in a fast scan of brain health, and compare you against standard benchmarks to your age. In keeping with the startup, which says it goals to assist 10 million patients by 2032, eye tracking protocols could also help test for other diseases and conditions including concussion, Alzheimer’s, MS and stroke.
The startup is within the strategy of filing an application for FDA approval and hoping to achieve clearance to be used of its device a clinical support tool within the US later this 12 months. It’s working on the identical style of application within the European Union and anticipates gaining regulatory approval within the EU in 2025.
So how does the device work? The patient looks through the headset and sees a screen where dots appear. A clinician will then tell them to follow the dots with their eyes, after which the device extracts data that might be used as disease biomarkers by recording and analyzing their eye movements, measuring things like latency and error rate. It also provides the clinician with an ordinary value expected from a healthy population to match with the patient’s results.
“The primary scientific paper that’s using eye tracking to diagnose patients is 1905,” neuroClues co-founder and CEO Antoine Pouppez told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview, noting the technique was initially used for diagnosing schizophrenia. Within the Sixties, when video eye trackers arrived, there was a boom in research into the technique for tracking neurological disorders. But a long time of research into the usefulness of eye-tracking as a diagnostic technique has not translated into widespread clinical uptake since the tech wasn’t there yet and/or was too expensive, said Pouppez.
“That’s where this technology comes from: The frustration of my co-founders to see that eye tracking has plenty of value — that’s been demonstrated in research that has been clinically proven on 1000’s of patients in research setups — and it’s still not utilized in clinical practice,” he said. “Doctors today use their fingers — and literally say ‘follow my finger’ — whereas a watch is moving at 600 degrees per second. You’re doing three eye movements per second. And so it’s very, very difficult — near inconceivable — to judge how well you’re moving around [by human eye alone].”
Others have similarly spotted the potential to do more with eye tracking as a diagnostic aid.
U.S.-based Neurosync, for instance, offers a VR headset combined with FDA-cleared eye tracking software it says can analyze the wearer’s eye movements “as an aid to concussion diagnosis.” The product is geared toward football players and athletes in other contact sports who face elevated risk of head injury.
There are also mobile app makers — corresponding to BrainEye — pitching consumers on smartphone-based eye-tracking tech for self testing “brain health.” (Such claims will not be evaluated by medical device regulators, nonetheless.)
But neuroClues stands out in quite a lot of ways. First, it says its headset might be situated in an everyday clinician’s office, without the necessity for a dark room set-up nor specialist computing hardware. It’s not using off-the-shelf hardware but as a substitute developing dedicated eye-tracking headsets for eye testing designed to record at high speed and control the recording environment. The outfit’s founders further argue that by constructing its own hardware and software, neuroClues enjoys unrivaled speed of information capture in a commercially deployed, non-static device.
To guard these ostensible benefits, neuroClues has plenty of patents granted (or filed) that it says cover various features of the design, corresponding to the synchronization of the hardware and software, and its approach to analyzing data.
“We’re the just one in the marketplace today that’s recording an 800 frames per second on a transportable device,” said Pouppez, noting that the research “gold standard” is 1,000 frames per second. “There isn’t any clinical or non-clinical product that’s doing it at that frame rate, which meant that we needed to lift barriers that nobody had lifted before.”
Image credit: neuroClues
neuroClues, which was incubated within the Paris Brain Institute, expects the primary eye-tracking headsets to be deployed in specialist settings corresponding to university hospitals, so to be used on patients who’ve already been referred to consultants. It notes the service shall be reimbursable via existing medical health insurance codes as eye tracking tests are a longtime medical intervention. The corporate says it’s also talking to plenty of other outfits within the U.S. and Europe which are keen on its hardware and software.
This primary version of the device is designed as a diagnostic aid, meaning a clinician remains to be accountable for interpreting the outcomes. But Pouppez said the team’s goal is to evolve the technology to serve up interpretations of the info, too, so the device might be deployed more broadly.
“Our goal is quickly to maneuver right down to bring that diagnostics capabilities to practitioners,” he told us. “We hope to be in the marketplace with such a tool in ’26/’27. And so to broaden up our market perspectives and really be in [the toolbox of] every neurologist in US and in Europe.”
The startup is announcing close of a €5 million pre-Series A round of funding, led by White Fund and the European Commission’s EIC Accelerator program. Existing investors Invest.BW, plus plenty of business angels, including Fiona du Monceau, former Chair of the Board at UCB, Artwall, and Olivier Legrain, CEO of IBA, also participated. Including this round neuroClues has raised a complete of €12M since being founded back in 2020.
Pouppez said it would be seeking to raise a Series A in the following 12 to 18 months. “Our existing investors and the European Commission have already shown interest in participating, so mainly i’m in search of a lead investor,” he added.
