Contact probe based stiffness sensing of human eye

The internal eye pressure is an important index for judging whether an eye suffers from glaucoma or not. The conventional eye pressure measurement is valid only under the condition that all subjects have the same structural eye stiffness. This paper challenges stiffness sensing of the human eye by pressing it with a contact probe. The displacement of the eye is captured by a camera with high resolution. Experimental results show that the stiffness is roughly constant for each subject, while it differs by up to a factor of five between subjects. The method can detect subjects whose eye stiffness is smaller than average for further careful medical examination