Healthx, the University of Utah's eye-controlled game for lazy eye

Healthx came out of the University of Utah's Entertainment Arts & Engineering program, where a student team worked with researchers at the John A. Moran Eye Center. It targets amblyopia, or lazy eye, which the team says can lead to permanent visual impairment if left untreated. The team's starting point was that standard eye exercises are dull and that children rarely stick with them.

The game is controlled entirely by gaze. An eye tracker using near infrared light follows the player's eyes, and the games make the weaker eye work by asking the player to look across the whole screen. Healthx is a collection of eye-controlled games, including a top-down shooter that demands fast target acquisition and a slower balloon-popping game. The tracker also records every action the player makes. Graduate students Ahmad Alsaleem and Eric Allen were named as co-researchers.

Eye tracking tells a device where the eyes are focused and can show presence, attention and drowsiness. In conversations with eye care professionals the developers learned that compliance with current strengthening techniques is low, especially among children, and that treatments and diagnostic tools are rarely designed around a child's nature.

The University of Utah won Best Student Developed Serious Game at the 2015 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge, an event run at I/ITSEC. It was the university's second win in a row in that category: the 2014 award went to CyberHeist from the same program. The challenge's entry page for Healthx lists it as a student entry from the University of Utah, a 2.5D shooting game for Windows, built in Unity and dependent on a Tobii eye tracker.

The university's own news article about the award, dated December 18, 2015, is still online. It says Healthx was in clinical trials with selected patients at the Moran Eye Center and that the students hoped to have the game available by the end of 2016. The Moran Eye Center website loads in November 2026.

No later page was found that reports trial results, clearance for clinical use or a release to patients, and the challenge's entry offers a video but no download. Healthx is therefore listed as unconfirmed.