About Vertigocatcher

The global care for humans with vertiogo and balancedisorders does not work optimally at all today. Patients with disorders of the sense of balance receive no or the wrong diagnosis, are investigated with examinations that do not lead to a diagnosis and are referred to untargeted ineffective treatments. This also applies in Swedish healthcare where the sense of balance is examined sporadically or usually not at all.

Analysis of eye movements is the only way to diagnostize the most common balance disorders. But technology to visualize eye movements is not widespread in healthcare. In addition, sharp analyzes of eye movements require extensive experience and are perceived by many caregivers as somewhat difficult. In addition, diagnostic timing is an important factor, examinations during dizziness-free periods run the risk of being completely normal.

Vertigocatcher Diagnostics’ idea is a management where the parts of healthcare’s dizzy care that do not work well today are moved and ”outsourced”. You who are affected by dizziness are usually the most motivated to achieve a fast and safe diagnosis, therefore we give you part of the diagnostic responsibility.

1 With the optical adapter Nystagmocatcher, your mobile phone becomes a digital measuring instrument for the impulses of the sense of balance. In this way, you can initially become independent of the equipment and competence of the local healthcare system to examine the sense of balance

2 Through clear audio instructions, we create the conditions for you to be able to carry out a standardized examination of balance impulses all by yourself

3 The performance of the examination is moved from the healthcare system and to you who are affected by vertigo. Since examination findings from periods of strong symptoms have very high diagnostic accuracy, you should perform the examination exactly then. You thereby also take on the responsibility of deciding when your dizziness symptoms are particularly strong. And you can do the examinations at any time of the day and regardless of where you are.

4 The analysis of the documented eye movements is moved from general healthcare and to us balance specialists. We have many years of training and experience in analyzing diagnostic eye movements and treating vertigo disorders

5 A communication platform with high requirements for privacy protection according to GDPR must connect you as a patient with us dizziness specialists.

The goal is time- and cost-effective dizziness healthcare where early diagnosis and targeted treatment have the highest priority. In addition to less suffering and lower societal costs, our way of working should also prevent functional complications that are very common after the experience of losing balance control.

Since 2017, Vertigocatcher Diagnostics has been developing telemedicine diagnostics of balance impulses. To begin with, only for long-distance patients to Yrselcenter yrselklinik Stockholm.

Since May 2024, both hardware and software have been commercialized, MDR certified and approved for use by other healthcare providers in Swedish healthcare and within the EU. In August 2023, the first scientific study was published in the Journal of Neurology, 62 patients were examined with the Nystagmocatcher by the balance clinic at Maastricht University Hospital in Holland.

Gaining access to information about people’s balance impulses around the clock has brought a lot of new knowledge. The biggest insights have been the understanding of the complexity of vertigo diseases. A handful of known dizziness disorders seem to be constantly changing and appearing in new variants of each other. When also functional causes of symptoms are added to the amount of physical errors, a raffle of different symptoms arises.

The possibility of diagnosing dizzy people not only via a single measurement of balance impulses during the clinic visit, but via several measurements over a few days, has opened a new diagnostic window for dizziness and balance disorders.

As an example, consistent error impulses from a sensory injury in a balance organ or from an episode of benign positional vertigo can be distinguished from an episode of disturbances in the central nervous system when the examination findings encountered on repeated measurement occasions appear completely different, bizarre and inconsistent.

The experience since 2017 is that telemedical monitoring of balance sense impulses is the only way to get a structured understanding of this tombola of different causes of dizziness that constantly replace each other in dizzy people. And only by understanding what our patients are currently suffering from, can effective treatments be suggested. Only then is it possible to interrupt the galloping cascade of physical and functional symptoms in many vertigo sufferers.

BPPV, atypical positional dizziness, vestibular neuritis, vestibular migraine and Ménière’s disease are the most common physical dizziness disorders. All these illnesses are named diseases of the sense of balance and they all cause diagnostic eye movements during periods of strong symptoms.

Functional and conditional dizziness is another common cause. These symptoms are controlled by the amygdala in the brain and are partly psychologically related. Functional dizziness is often associated with the onset of physical dizziness but never triggers abnormal eye movements. Functional dizziness can also be part of an anxiety disorder or result from stress.

A stroke in the cerebellum or brainstem is a rare condition but has been seen in less than one per cent of all acute dizziness without concomitant neurological symptoms. Typical symptoms are a sudden onset of illness with difficulties in walking and sitting. This serious condition also causes diagnostic eye movements but should not be investigated with Nystagmocatcher. If a stroke is suspected, the person affected should immediately be taken to an emergency department for the fastest possible stroke treatment.

There are also several other physical causes of dizziness, but these causes are less common and collectively account for only 25 per cent of all cases (Brandt 1999).

To summarise, all of the physical disorders of the sense of balance will result in diagnostic eye movements if examined at the right time. However, non-physical functional dizziness disorders will never cause abnormal eye movements, such as when being examined during a panic attack.

Common balance disorders are not visible in blood tests, ECGs or X-rays. The only certain way to detect or rule out physical disorders of the sense of balance is to assess eye movements – referred to as nystagmus analysis.

The most common dizziness disorders are presented on our webbpage www.yrsel.com (swedish) including those that do not affect the sense of balance, as well as some unusual dizziness disorders.

Dizziness is a very complex symptom. The same disorder can cause different symptoms in different people. In addition, people can suffer from several dizziness disorders at the same time, often a mixture of both physical and functional balance disorders. Further info (swedish).

Many scientific studies describe the difficulties in receiving help with dizziness from general healthcare systems. In one study, only half of dizziness patients were diagnosed at all, and of those who were diagnosed, only half felt helped (Ito 2020). In another study of patients seeking help for sudden dizziness from emergency departments, eight out of ten were misdiagnosed (Kerber 2008).