When Yoav Tzivoni, a seriously injured soldier in the northern Gaza Strip, woke up after six months in the intensive care unit of Samson Assuta University Hospital in Ashdod, he asked the nurse what was his favorite heavy metal music.
“I was shaking with excitement when the nurse texted me that Yoav was asking for his music!” says Michal Finkelstein, a product specialist and speech therapist by training, who is responsible for customer relations and success at Israeli company EyeControl.
“What? Is he awake?” Finkelstein wondered, saying she was “shaking with excitement.”
Tzivoni and his fellow injured patients in intensive care are benefiting from an additional, recently discovered and potentially internationally revolutionary use of EyeControl, a wearable device that allows patients – including those on ventilators – to communicate with medical staff and family members via eye gestures and a bone-conducting headset, to hear recorded messages from loved ones – and listen to their favorite music.
EyeControl helps improve clinical outcomes, prevent cognitive decline, and improve the patient and family experience. It is currently being tested at prestigious university hospitals in Israel and abroad to see if it reduces delirium in intensive care patients.
Tzivoni is one of the lucky ones. After months of hospitalization and extensive rehabilitation, he lives with his girlfriend in Tel Aviv, where he attends outpatient therapy twice a week and has managed to get permission from the army to join its elite combat unit (as a volunteer) – he is now responsible for logistics.
His classmate Tzvika Lavi, 30, was not so lucky. The religious father of three young daughters from Eli died on Dec. 12 after suffering serious injuries on Nov. 20, 2023. While Lavi was in the hospital, Finkelstein said her family cherished the opportunity to communicate with her husband and father via the EyeControl device.
“When his wife, an occupational therapist, heard about the device, she said, ‘Yalla, let’s do it!’ She and the girls had already recorded messages to play on the device. His wife told me that Tzvika was very religious. She said it calmed her down to know that even on Shabbat he could hear her voice and the voices of her children and parents. I almost started crying…”
Success of using EyeControl on patients
Dr. Ami Mayo, Director of Intensive Care at Assuta Ashdod Intensive Care Unit, is pleased with the success observed in using EyeControl among patients in the intensive care unit. Mayo explains some of the issues and complexities of caring for intensive care unit patients. Although the team is able to monitor vital areas such as blood pressure, oxygen levels and heart rate, he notes that monitoring the patient’s cognitive functions and arousal is more difficult.
“In intensive care, we have difficulty communicating with patients.” He points out that this makes it difficult to monitor sedation, which sometimes leads to oversedation.
“Patients who are sedated in intensive care are in a state of artificial sleep, not good sleep.” Mayo explains that the brain then “makes up all sorts of stories and fables to fill in the gaps, which can lead to nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder and delirium, a state of confusion a patient may experience upon waking.” When this happens, they may even begin to remove critical monitoring tubes and devices. Mayo explains some of the potential benefits of EyeControl.
“When I play familiar sounds to sedated patients, it provides their brains with the raw material to fill in the gaps and reduces harmful side effects.”
Additionally, observing patients’ reactions to “listening to music, hello and goodbye messages, and the voices of loved ones tells us whether the sedation is excessive – and we can control the dose.” »
Mayo notes that “by sending messages – even to a sedated patient – some of them get through. We find that many soldiers connected (to the device) actually remember the voices and their beloved music. -Post-traumatic stress disorder in intensive care. “I hope every patient in intensive care gets this device.”
But without a meeting with EyeControl co-founder Or Reitzin, the device may never have progressed beyond its intended use as a communications device for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease of the nervous system that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. ALS causes loss of muscle control and progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain and leads to difficulty breathing. “When Gold told me about the ALS project, we thought together and realized that it could be applied to all patients in intensive care units. »
The EyeControl website states that the company “was created by co-founders who all have personal connections to people with locked-in syndrome (LIS), a rare and serious neurological disorder that occurs when the brainstem is damaged and They suffer from total paralysis, but are still conscious and have normal cognitive abilities. » People with this syndrome can communicate through eye movements.
Reitzin, 38, the company’s co-founder and CEO, teamed up with Itai Kornberg, CTO, and Shai Rishon, an ALS patient who died in 2018 at age 52. Although EyeControl has been helpful in ALS patients, Reitzin says, “ALS was too small as a company. After his meetings and subsequent collaboration with medical teams like those of Dr. Mayo, supporting soldiers and others, in intensive care units, he notes with playfulness and pride: “Now people don’t remember us as an ALS device!
Interest in EyeControl’s potential has been growing in Israel and around the world. Reitzin reports that with support from the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development Fund (BIRD), EyeControl is currently participating in a multicenter clinical trial at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Assuta and Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva, as well as another clinical trial, funded by an NIH AI program, that will soon take place at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
The company wants to demonstrate the reduction of delirium phenomena in intensive care, considered very costly.
Recent investors include the European Bank through its European Council Fund and Google’s AI Fund. EyeControl currently operates primarily in Israel under the umbrella of Clalit, the country’s largest healthcare fund, and is in the process of implementing additional select sites in the United States. Noa Mintz, Head of Clinical and Business Development – US, talks about the success she is already seeing in the US.
A rare solution in medical technology
“It’s rare that a medical technology solution is useful to virtually everyone in the U.S. healthcare system. We have been overwhelmed by the positive response we have received from all sides, from hospital executives to bedside nurses. They recognize that EyeControl-Med not only improves their care workflows; it transforms the dynamic between clinicians, patients and their loved ones. EyeControl provides a very concrete and profound opportunity for families to play an active and meaningful role in patient care. We implement these human-centered, compassionate interventions that healthcare providers wholeheartedly believe in, but don’t always have the infrastructure and resources to facilitate. I think at EyeControl we have truly cracked this code and are catalyzing a person-centered approach, even in intensive care units and in the most life-threatening situations. »
Connection between soldiers and their families
Even as EyeControl has grown and evolved, they have not lost sight of their true purpose: helping patients and their families. Finkelstein, the product specialist, admits: “I don’t usually contact families, but since they were warriors and soldiers, it became something else. I feel privileged to meet soldiers and their families and create real connections.
She will never forget the day wounded soldier Yoav Tzivoni asked for heavy metal music and the head nurse told him to bring four of the devices “as soon as possible.”
Yedida Tzivoni, mother of the seriously injured soldier, will never forget the moment Dr. Mayo approached her to ask for permission to use the EyeControl device.
“We recorded brachot (blessings) and songs that he loved. It was very moving to learn that after three weeks he remembered listening to the music we had recorded.” She made sure this reporter was seated when she said that EyeControl and the care he received at Assuta had brought him to the point where he is currently returning to join his elite combat unit for voluntary reserve service. As a result, Tzivoni was unavailable for comment.
Although CEO Reitzin expected the results the team saw in terms of patient outcomes, he concedes: “We didn’t expect to see how enormous the benefits would be for families and for our clinical teams who are also part of the healing process. »
Reitzin concludes: “We are honored to be able to support every patient – but especially our Soldiers. We are particularly honored to help keep the memory of Tzvika Lavi alive by participating in the Itzhar Shay initiative next October. The initiative, proposed by Shay, an entrepreneur and former Minister of Science and Technology who lost his own son on October 7, aims to create a new technology start-up for every fallen soldier and civilian victim of the 7 october. do good” as a fundamental value.