A new and economical device was recently developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab that could help in diagnosing refractive defects of the eye in less than 2 minutes.
The device is expected to make much-needed eye care accessible to villagers who cannot afford to make a visit to the optometrist.
From in.news.yahoo.com:
As of now, the NETRA can only be used with a high-resolution cell phone display, but Raskar said he hoped that “though not everyone can buy such a phone, a village shopkeeper may have one and it can be used to provide eye care to everyone in the village”.
“We are working towards an NGO model now. The cost of diagnosis is usually higher than the cost of delivering spectacles to those with faulty vision. Now that cost can be minimised. The point of this device is to provide an optometric solution where you don’t need trial lenses and a reading chart,” he added.
The Camera Culture Lab is exploring collaboration with Hyderabad-based LV Prasad Eye Institute. “When Director Balasubramaniam visited MIT a few months ago, we realised that the device was perfectly suited to a developing country scenario. It’s an ideal collaboration,” Raskar said.
Other projects at the lab include a 3-D display that requires no glasses, a new CAT scan machine and, hold your breath, a camera that can look around the corner and size up objects not visible otherwise — a tool that could be useful in medical procedures like endoscopy.
The Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment, or NETRA, is a small device that could be clipped onto a phone with the requisite software installed on it. The device can generate prescription in less than two minutes by using the phone display to run tests through an array of lenslets made of plastic.
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Tags: CAT scan, endoscopy, eye care, NETRA, optometrist
