# Development of New Approaches to Rehabilitating Vision Loss in Veterans With Age-Related Macular Degeneration

> **NIH VA I21** · CHARLIE NORWOOD VA MEDICAL CENTER · 2024 · —

## Abstract

The overall goal of the proposed exploratory project is to help develop novel approaches to rehabilitating
visually impaired Veterans. While the current rehabilitative approaches can be effective, there is indisputably
much room for improvement. Apropos to which, recent research has provided new insights into how the brain,
healthy and diseased alike, ‘makes up’ for what is impaired in one sensory modality (e.g., vision) by recruiting
compensating information from another sensory modality, e.g., active (or haptic) touch. The proposed bench-
to-bedside translational project seeks to evaluate the feasibility of leveraging these crossmodal research
insights to help develop the next generation of rehabilitative therapies for visually impaired Veterans.
 The research insight most directly relevant to the present project is this: At any given time, there will be
multiple different objects around us. In recruiting haptic information to help compensate for gaps in the visual
information, the brain (healthy or otherwise) must have a way of deciding which haptic object corresponds to
which visual object. It turns out that the brain infers that a given visual object corresponds to a given haptic
object if the two objects meet one or both of the following two ‘crossmodal recruitment criteria’ (CRC): (i) The
brain receives information about the two objects from the same location in the outer world, and/or (ii) It
receives the information from both sources at the same time. We hypothesize that, by appropriately
manipulating the given CRC, it should be possible to ‘coax’ the brain to better recruit the haptic information to
better compensate for vision loss, a proposition supported by our preliminary results.
 Each of the two Specific Aims of the proposed study seeks to characterize the efficacy of one of the above
two CRCs. Each Aim will test the hypothesis that optimal values of the corresponding CRC can help optimize
crossmodal integration for each Veteran in an evidence-based fashion customized for that Veteran.
 To help make the proposed study directly relevant to the healthcare of Veterans, we will carry out the study
procedures in older Veterans (≥50 years) with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), one of the most
common causes of vision loss in Veterans in this age group. As visual and haptic stimuli, we will use the actual
objects that are currently in active use at our VA to rehabilitate Veterans with visual impairments.
 We will use a random controlled trials (RCT) design, whereby Veterans will be randomly assigned to a
Treatment or a Control Group. Patients in either Group will continue all their regular medical treatments
unrelated to the present study, but subjects in the Treatment Group will additionally receive study-related
visual-haptic Rehabilitative Training. All subjects in either Group will also receive periodic, study-related
Outcome Testing consisting of custom-designed object recognition tests, and functional magnetic resonance
imagi...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10700573
- **Project number:** 1I21RX004099-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** CHARLIE NORWOOD VA MEDICAL CENTER
- **Principal Investigator:** Jay Hegde
- **Activity code:** I21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** VA
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** —
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-06-01 → 2026-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10700573

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10700573, Development of New Approaches to Rehabilitating Vision Loss in Veterans With Age-Related Macular Degeneration (1I21RX004099-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10700573. Licensed CC0.

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