TV trainer

A TV trainer is a sheet of plastic, one side all red and the other all green, that usually attaches to a television with two suction cups.¹ The patient wears red/green glasses, so each eye sees through only the matching half of the sheet, and the device aims to decrease the intensity and frequency of suppression.¹ If the right eye suppresses, the picture behind the red half of the sheet becomes impossible to see.¹

The TV trainer is a passive therapy, because the patient simply watches television and tries to see through both halves of the plastic at once.¹ Losing the picture calls attention to the suppression, and the patient works to clear it by blinking, by converging or diverging, or by moving closer to or farther from the television.¹ The same arrangement, with one color filter over the screen and the opposite color before the nonamblyopic eye, also appears in amblyopia therapy for very young children.²