Counting the Results of EyeFree's EIC Accelerator ICU Eye Tracker

A patient on a ventilator cannot speak, and in an intensive care unit that silence lasts days. EyeFree Assisting Communication, a Tel Aviv company better known by its product name EyeControl, sells a headset that reads the patient's eye movements with a small camera and talks back through a bone-conduction earpiece, so no screen and no calibration are needed. In the European Innovation Council's March 2020 round it was one of the companies selected for their relevance to COVID-19, and the EU paid it €2,134,658.75 to take the device into hospital ICUs.

Six years on, the headset exists, carries the regulatory listings the project aimed for and is bought by Israel's largest health fund. Other parts of the plan are harder to find in the record: the global platform the company promised, a US or European hospital customer, and the evidence that the device reduces delirium. The randomised trial meant to show that finished in November 2025 and has published nothing.

Where EyeFree Stands Now

EyeFree is active. The Israeli Corporations Authority lists it as an active private company that has filed its annual report for 2024, at the same Tel Aviv address it gave the EU, according to the register's open data; OpenCorporates shows the same status and address. Its US device registration with the FDA runs to 2026, according to openFDA, and it was the industry collaborator in a randomised trial that completed in November 2025, according to ClinicalTrials.gov.

The company does not publish revenue, and Israeli private companies do not file accounts publicly. The clearest signal of size is the team. Calcalist counted 20 employees in Israel and the UK when the company closed its Series A in August 2020. Tracxn and Startupim both list 22 in 2026.

Commercially, the device is anchored in Israel. A Jerusalem Post report from June 2024 says EyeControl operates "mainly in Israel through Clalit", the country's largest health fund, while implementing "additional selected sites" in the US. The EU's own CORDIS results story says the same: EyeControl-Med is available to Clalit hospitals, and the team was "in discussion" with ICU procurement departments in Israel, the US and the UK. No named hospital customer outside Israel has been announced. The company website lists Northwell, a New York health system, among the logos of its network, without describing the relationship.

The Technology: Talking With the Eyes, Without a Screen

Eye-tracking communication aids for people who cannot speak usually put a screen in front of the patient, who selects letters or symbols by looking at them after the system has been calibrated. That works at a desk or a bed-mounted tablet, but CEO Or Retzkin told CORDIS such systems "tend to be cumbersome, screen-dependent and are usually not available 24/7", with training that can take up to a week while the average ICU stay is 3.8 days.

EyeControl replaces the screen with sound. According to the company's first Horizon 2020 project, an infrared camera on the headset turns movements of the pupil into a "joystick" for a small computer, which reads options into a bone-conduction earphone, so the user hears what he wants to say before the device transmits it through a speaker. The hospital version, EyeControl-Med, adds a remote nurse dashboard, orientation messages such as the date and place, and recorded voice messages from family, according to the project's final report. The company says patients learn it in under 20 minutes; that figure comes from the company and has not been confirmed in an independent study.

What the EIC Award Promised, and What the Record Shows

The European Commission's list of selected companies places EYEFREE ASSISTING COMMUNICATION LTD among the "20 March 2020 cut-off date selected COVID19-related projects", with blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity. No other company is listed for the project. When the Commission announced the round on 8 June 2020, it said almost €166 million would go to 36 companies working on the coronavirus response, out of nearly 4,000 applicants in March.

The grant agreement was signed on 16 July 2020, and the project ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022, according to CORDIS. It was a follow-on: the objective describes it as "expanding the scope of the recently finalized SME Phase 2 grant", a €1,990,275 Horizon 2020 grant that ran from March 2018 to February 2020 for the home version for ALS and other locked-in patients, according to CORDIS. Globes and NoCamels both reported that this made EyeControl the first Israeli company to win both the SME Instrument Phase 2 and the EIC Accelerator.

The new project promised technical improvements that would speed entry into the hospital market, two product lines, EyeControl Home and EyeControl Facility, and, once the ICU niche was "consolidated", a position as "the global communication platform for both ventilated and Locked-in patients". The final report, covering August 2021 to July 2022, says EyeControl-Med was built, is "listed for commercial use by the FDA and CE" and has an enhanced nurse dashboard. It reports a 15-patient first phase at Beilinson Hospital, a second phase with a comparison group from February 2022, purchase codes from Clalit, Israeli AMAR registration, and ISO 27001 and 27799 certification. The FDA's database confirms that EyeControl is listed under product code ILQ, a powered communication system, with a listing date of 4 July 2018, according to openFDA; no 510(k) clearance number is attached.

1. Hospital product with nurse dashboardDeliveredEyeControl-Med built and sold to Clalit hospitals, per the final report and Jerusalem Post.
2. Two product lines, home and facilityDeliveredEyeControl-Home and EyeControl-Med described by CORDIS and ExitValley.
3. Regulatory listings for market entryDeliveredFDA listing confirmed on openFDA; CE marking and AMAR stated by the company in the CORDIS report.
4. Hospital trials in the US, Europe and IsraelPartlyTrials in Israel and the US are published or registered; no European hospital trial is registered or published.
5. Global platform for ventilated and locked-in patientsNot achievedSales "mainly in Israel" in 2024; no hospital customer outside Israel announced.

The project was delivered on time as a development project: CORDIS shows it closed on its scheduled end date, and the product it was meant to finish is on the market. What the plan sold to the EIC, a global platform built on an ICU foothold, has not appeared in public in the four years since.

The Clinical Evidence So Far

Two small studies have been published. At Beilinson Hospital, 15 ventilated patients used the device in three to seven sessions; their score on a communication scale rose by 19.3 points and their mean number of errors on the CAM-ICU delirium screen fell from 6.5 to 2.5, according to a pilot study in the Journal of Critical Care. The study had a single arm, no control group, and "was conducted with funding from EyeControl"; the authors themselves wrote that controlled studies are needed.

An independent feasibility trial at Emory University in Atlanta, sponsored by the university with EyeFree as collaborator, was less flattering. Of 30 ventilated patients who were awake and able to follow commands, 11, or 36%, passed the predefined proficiency test of calling for help and answering multiple-choice questions, while 70% could operate parts of the device, according to the published results and the trial registry. Eight patients passed on the first day, three on the second and none on the third. No serious adverse events were recorded.

The test that matters most for hospital buyers is the randomised one. EMERGE, led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston with Rabin and Assuta medical centres in Israel and funding from the Israel-US BIRD Foundation, compared the company's EyeControl-Pro platform with a sham control in 160 ventilated patients aged 50 or older, measuring the share of delirium-free assessments over seven days, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. It started on 25 February 2024 and completed on 18 November 2025. No results have been posted, and no publication or company announcement of the outcome could be found. When EyeControl-Pro was presented in June 2022, Retzkin said the aim was to help "the up to 80% of ICU patients experiencing Delirium", according to IT Digest, which carried the company's release; ExitValley's investor page says approval for the delirium indication will only be sought after the trial.

The Money

On 12 August 2020, eleven days after the EIC project began, EyeControl announced a $7.5 million Series A led by Connecticut Innovations, with Benslie International, Clive Barret and the Menomadin Foundation and earlier backers including Zora Ventures, Impact First and Rimonci Capital, according to Calcalist. Calcalist put the EIC money at a $2.5 million grant; Globes reported more than $10 million in combined funding and did not split it. Former EarlySense chief executive Avner Halperin became chairman.

The equity half of the blended award did happen. The EIC Fund portfolio lists EyeFree Assisting Communication, checked across all 16 pages of the fund's invested-company list, and the Jerusalem Post named the fund among recent investors in 2024. The amount and date of the EIC investment are not public. Since then, the company has raised money in smaller ways. Its ExitValley campaign, a convertible round with a $15,000 minimum ticket, closed at 619% of its target, without a stated amount or date; Startupim dates it to April 2025 and calls the amount undisclosed. The BIRD Foundation funds the EMERGE trial. Total funding figures from data providers disagree and are not used here.

Why Europe Should Care

The award was part of the Commission's emergency response to COVID-19, when ICUs across Europe filled with ventilated patients who could not speak and families who could not visit. That crisis has passed, but the problem has not: a 2026 scoping review of 11 studies found eye-tracking devices effective for communicating basic needs with ventilated patients, yet "only used in a few ICUs", and called for large randomised trials. EyeFree is one of the few companies running one.

The European return on the €4.12 million of grants is harder to show. The company is Israeli, its sales are in Israel, and its US activity is in trials. No European hospital customer or European trial site has been made public, even though the device is CE marked according to the company.

The Verdict

EyeFree Assisting Communication has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements, trial registries and EU project data, linked throughout.