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UC River­side Pro­fes­sor Slams Feds, Stands By His Health App (KQED):

“UC River­side pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy Aaron Seitz had an idea for a mobile health app based on his area of research.…Seitz is the aca­d­e­m­ic behind UltimEyes, the vision improve­ment app that got dinged by the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion (FTC) for $150,000 last week for mak­ing decep­tive claims about the app’s efficacy.

Aside from the mon­ey owed, Seitz and Gold­berg agreed to stop mak­ing claims about the mobile app’s abil­i­ty to improve vision. Pri­or to the FTC’s involve­ment,  pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al and lan­guage on the UltimEyes web­site (still avail­able on the Apple and Google Play app stores, for $5.99) said the app was “sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly shown” to do just that.

The FTC com­plaint against Car­rot Neu­rotech­nol­o­gy lists an array of relat­ed asser­tions on that theme, includ­ing one that the app improved vision an aver­age of 31 per­cent and two lines on the stan­dard Stellen eye chart, and anoth­er that it helps mit­i­gate pres­by­opia, the grad­ual loss of the abil­i­ty to focus on near­by objects…

Seitz has laid out his con­cerns in an open let­ter on his UC River­side fac­ul­ty page, ask­ing friends and col­leagues to post sup­port­ive com­ments with the FTC dur­ing the pub­lic com­ment period…“The gov­ern­ment real­ly needs to be lis­ten­ing to sci­en­tists here,” he said. “They ignored experts we brought to tes­ti­fy and the sci­en­tif­ic literature…

Enforce­ment actions like the one against UltimEyes are prob­a­bly going to hap­pen more fre­quent­ly, says Bradley Mer­rill Thomp­son, a lawyer…“The agree­ment is the next step in a whole series of cas­es the FTC has brought with respect to mobile appli­ca­tions,” he said. Last month, the FTC barred a com­pa­ny from mak­ing claims that the“Mole Detec­tive” line of apps could detect melanoma.”

Learn more:

• Brain Train­ing Eval­u­a­tion Checklist
• Solv­ing the Brain Fit­ness Puz­zle Is the Key to Self-Empow­ered Aging
• What’s in it for me: Ten crit­i­cal ques­tions to nav­i­gate media cov­er­age of lat­est sci­en­tif­ic findings
• Can brain train­ing work? Yes, if it meets these 5 conditions
• 2015 Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit: Mon­i­tor­ing & Enhanc­ing Brain Health in the Per­va­sive Neu­rotech­nol­o­gy Era (Novem­ber 17–19th, 2015)