Mobile health: using smartphones to check people’s vision is taking off
Soon opticians – and even their assistants – will be able to check people's vision using just a mobile phone, and it won't matter if they're not sure what they're seeing because the phone will know what to look for. Space-age future? Far from it. The eye-miracle phone is already here. In fact, it's being used in the world's poorest countries."Smartphones have been getting better and better, and the fortuitous coincidence is that their optical elements are so small, in fact smaller than a pupil", explains Dr Iain Livingstone, a paediatric ophthalmologist at Peekvision, the UK-based organisation behind the technology. "With a few tweaks, we can put that to our advantage."Peekvision's technology utilises an ordinary smartphone, which can be used in place of the expensive and complicated ophthalmoscopes that have been a mainstay of eye exams for decades. This is how it works: an optician or even a minimally trained healthcare worker points the adjusted smartphone into the patient's eye. The phone automatically focuses on what it is supposed to look for – say, a cataract – and captures the image, allowing the healthcare worker to send it on to more qualified experts by email or text message."That circumvents the training an optician needs in order to operate an ophthalmoscope and understand its results", says Livingstone. "Anybody can conduct the eye exam." The Vancouver-based company has developed smartphone applications where the phone screen acts as a monitor, while a sensor is connected to the audioport.With blindness being preventable in 80% of cases, there's an obvious need for eye exams, especially in the developing world. Peekvision's mobile phone has already been introduced in Kenya (and Scotland) and found to reliably identify and photograph not just cataracts but severe diabetes and macular degeneration as well. All three are leading causes of blindness."The phone can be used as a diagnostic tool for the developing world and a self-diagnostic tool in the developed world", explains Tom Walker, CEO of Lionsgate Technologies. The Vancouver-based company has developed smartphone applications where the phone screen acts as a monitor, while a sensor is connected to the audioport.Brits won't be self-examining their eyes en masse any time soon. But for perhaps the first time ever, they may soon be using the same healthcare solutions as their fellow patients in the developing world.
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