When my son was diagnosed with ADHD at age 9, I threw myself into research. Given my own adult ADHD diagnosis, I wanted to protect my child from the shame, self-doubt, and negative self-talk that I developed while growing up undiagnosed and untreated.
What I found in my research was confusing. Assessing whether a medication was effectively treating ADHD seemed heavily reliant on subjective reporting. How was I to reliably tell if my child’s ADHD medication and dose were really working as well as they should?
I was frustrated and determined to get clear results – and then I had a lightbulb moment.
The Truth Before Our Eyes
One day, I was reading with my kid. I watched as their eyes darted all over the page, the focus slipping away right in front of me. This must happen to so many people with ADHD when they try to read, I thought.
That’s when it hit me: When we read, our eyes follow a specific pattern. Unless we have ADHD, and then our wandering minds might lead to wandering eyes, making our reading patterns different and more erratic.
[Get This Free Download: How Do We Know the Medication Is Working?]
Eye movement is key; tracking it could reveal patterns and lead to a methodology for ultimately measuring focus. I brought the idea to my sister, an AI and bioinformatics expert. Together, we began to use AI to analyze reading processes and eye-movement patterns. We found that by tracking these patterns, we could develop a tool that would provide a clear, data-driven picture of how ADHD medication affects concentration and impulsivity, thus, a way to measure treatment efficacy.
Turning a Novel Idea Into Reality
Enter Ravid, my rollerblading buddy who also has ADHD and expertise in digital health product development. The three of us made this wild idea a reality. While Ravid and my sister built the product, I reached out to clinicians.
I learned in those conversations that there was no tool available that could objectively track medication efficacy for a patient outside of the clinic. Clinicians and researchers loved our approach. Reading is universal but complex enough to capture different aspects of ADHD, and eye tracking can reveal both concentration and impulse control levels.
And that’s how iFocus was born. You can log in to our site from a webcam-enabled computer and read a paragraph with and without your meds. Our tool will track your eye movement through your webcam as you read and establish a score representing your progress compared to your baseline.
[Read This Special Report: ADHD Treatments Scorecard from Readers]
Each session only takes a few minutes, but the impact, we think, can be life changing.
Putting People in Charge of Their ADHD Treatment
Recently, my kid started a new medication, and we used iFocus to find the right dose. The experience was completely different. They tested themselves, reported how they felt, and we had meaningful discussions about the results.
The dose where my child felt best was lower than I anticipated, but both my child’s report and iFocus results confirmed that the dose was working. This is just one example of how iFocus empowers people with ADHD to take control of their treatment journey.
ADHD Medication Efficacy: Next Steps
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