This Device Lets You Perform Eye Exams With a Smartphone

The World Health Organisation
estimates that there are 39 million
people suffering from blindness in the
world. An estimated 80% of these
people are thought to have blindness
that could be avoided if treatment is
administered. Most of these people
reside in third world countries. To help
identify visual impairments and warn
people Peek Vision has developed Peek
Retina, a device that connects to
smartphone cameras and recognizes
defects in the retina.
It all started when Dr Andrew
Bastawrous from the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine moved
to Kenya. He set up high tech
equipment to treat patients but found
that the treatment wasn’t reaching
those that needed it the most because
they couldn’t afford it. So he developed
PeekRetina with Peek Vision. It’s a clip
on costing $5 that modifies a
smartphone camera to take high quality
photos of the retina.
He estimates that about a 1000 people
can be examined in a week by one
person with a smartphone. The
Photographs (categorized by locations
on a map) are uploaded to a
server that is accessible to doctors
around the world. Then doctors contact
tribal leaders near those places to
inform them that treatment is on the
way.
Cataracts, Glaucoma and even diseases
like Malaria can be diagnosed from an
examination of the retina. The device
has been tested for months in
Botswana, Mali and Kenya and
is currently being funded through a
campaign on Indiegogo .
Dr Bastawrous, in a TED Talk he
delivered, said that some patients, like
one Mama Wangari, had been blind for
twenty years and through treatment
costing $40, was able to see her
grandchildren for the first time. His final
worlds were, “I think it says a lot about
us as a human race if we’ve developed
cures and we don’t deliver them…but
now we can.”