Apple Vision Pro for Medical Purposes

Hello, I work in ophthalmology at Stanford and I am hoping to develop a tool for monitoring vision health using Apple Vision Pro. However, I am worried that my goal will not be possible due to Apple privacy concerns. I want to develop an app that can gauge eye performance, but to do so I would need precise details about the users eye movements and eye position. Is this feasible? Also, I am eager to learn more about the specifics of the eye-tracking set up, like the accuracy and the sampling rate. If you have any useful information or suggestions, I would really appreciate it, thank you!

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aberens
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I do not see issues with Apple privacy, as long as you get user consent for tracking.

You should check guideline 1.4.1:

1.4.1 Medical apps that could provide inaccurate data or information, or that could be used for diagnosing or treating patients may be reviewed with greater scrutiny.

Apps must clearly disclose data and methodology to support accuracy claims relating to health measurements, and if the level of accuracy or methodology cannot be validated, we will reject your app. For example, apps that claim to take x-rays, measure blood pressure, body temperature, blood glucose levels, or blood oxygen levels using only the sensors on the device are not permitted.

Apps should remind users to check with a doctor in addition to using the app and before making medical decisions.

If your medical app has received regulatory clearance, please submit a link to that documentation with your app.

Posted by
Claude31
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  • Thank you for the prompt reply! My short term goal is to get an IRB approved study at Stanford/NASA to collect eye movement data from patients and establish a correlation between said metrics and the existing gold standards for medical decision making, which are optical coherence tomography and humphrey visual fields. I will not be making any health related claims at this time, I just want a functioning tool to study! Do you think that detailed data could be pulled from the device for research?

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    aberens

  • @Claude31 I am not sure what you mean. Apple has said clearly that they're not exposing eye tracking information. (It's a bit of a let-down exactly since it makes @aberens 's use case impossible.) @aberens I recommend filing a feature request in the feedback system with a clearly-worded description of your use case and the benefits overall. If Apple ever plans to try opening-up access to the eye-tracking data, they're going to want to see strong feedback and do work to ensure user consent.

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    KTRosenberg
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If you're proposing to make an app for internal use within your lab, then it doesn't need to go through App Review.

As @KTRosenberg points out, Apple have said that they are not exposing eye tracking information. But clearly the device does track eyes and some levels of the software have access to that. It may be that access to the eye tracking data is controlled by an "entitlement". It's possible that you may be able to enable this entitlement for your own not-app-reviewed apps. It may even be that they will have a system where you can apply to enable this entitlement for reviewed apps. Or not.

If I were you, I'd file a bug asking for access to eye tracking data enabled by an entitlement that you can enable for your own devices.

Posted by
endecotp
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In the WWDC Slack, an Apple employee answered this question: Apps do not get access to eye tracking data. No exceptions, including for medical research purposes.

Posted by
ppix
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  • It doesn’t stop people from pressing the issue for future versions of the OS. It’s worth discussing. Balancing privacy and functionality is an ongoing engineering and research problem, and it makes sense for v1 of the OS to be the most restricted.

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    KTRosenberg

  • From every comment made in WWDC videos, it's pretty clear that gaze tracking is seen by Apple as a fundamental privacy issues. I wouldn't hold my breath for them to open access to the raw gaze data.

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    mike_at_helium
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