Ella Brown is just 8 months old and she is having her first eye exam.
“My husband has very poor vision so I thought that maybe she’ll have poor vision at an early age.”

According to pediatrician, Dr. David Brown, diagnosing potential vision problems in infants can be a challenge. “When we did vision testing on very young children, usually under the age of 3 or 4, we could look at the child’s eyes, we could examine the child’s eyes, but we couldn’t see what the brain was seeing. As a result, we couldn’t pick up some of the things we can pick up now.”
Thanks to the Enfant Pediatric Vision Testing System doctors can now test children as young as 6 months of age for vision problems.
“Electrodes are placed on the head, 2 in the front and 1 in the back that will read off the brain, it’s a brain wave test. Then intermittently in mixed with the little characters on the screen, there’s a bunch of bars and the distance between the bars correlates with 20/20, 20/40, 20/60,” explains Dr. Brown.
The Enfant System uses technology to record the brain’s response to light. The device measures the health of the circuitry of the nerves, the visual pathways that send signals to the brain.
Amblyopia, which is poor vision in an eye that otherwise appears normal, occurs when there is a deficiency in that neural circuitry between the eye and the brain.
After a series of sweeps of each eye, the system utilizes synchronized data collection via special software to provide quick, analyses of the child’s eyes, compared to one another and individually, to determine if there are any irregularities.
“The child looks at a screen one eye at a time, looking at a pattern and then we read off the brain, the reception of the brain to that pattern. And what we are looking for is a comparison of the two halves of the brain which tell us whether both eyes are working together and seeing the same thing,” says Dr. Brown.
Since visual prognosis worsens when treatment is delayed, detecting visual defects early in pre-verbal children is a major step toward improved treatment of the problem. According to Prevent Blindness America, only 4% of children with vision problems are referred to pediatric ophthalmologists.
Betsy breathed a sigh of relief, little Ella did not inherit her father’s vision.
“Peace of mind to know everything is o.k., the test showed that she had good vision.”
Dr. Brown says that by 3 months of age, babies should be able to track and follow objects with their eyes. If they’re not, Enfant Vision Testing would be appropriate.

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