It seems like every week there is another revolutionary use of smartphones with the potential to change the way we do things. Smart Vision Labs has created such an invention with the help of the iPhone and its low-light 8-megapixel camera.  In short, what it does is enable is quick and inexpensive eye prescription diagnosis with a portable lens hooked up to an iPhone. The invention allows doctors to carry around in their pockets what used to require a visit to the optometrist’s office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpX53ZjoECQ
This week, we spoke with Smart Vision Labs co-founder Marc Albanese. Check out our interview and demo in the video below.
On a recent trip to Haiti, Marc and his team were able to set up a field optometrist’s office where they were able to diagnose eye prescriptions in around one minute per patient. Not only was an order of magnitude more efficient, it was especially useful for kids who aren’t always willing to sit through the normal routine eye exam.
I found myself in a rural village in Haiti, packed inside a crowded van with 16 other volunteers – all exhausted from a full day of vision tests. My colleague, Greg Van Kirk, and I were physically tired but mentally invigorated. As part of the refraction team, Greg and I helped to refract nearly 250 community members over a six hour time-frame, and we were rewarded with the smile of a woman seeing clearly for the first time, possibly in her whole life. In the process, we successfully field tested our smartphone-based autorefractor (the SVOne), something we have been working towards over the last two years. Experiencing firsthand the demand for vision services in Haiti provided our team with tremendous validation that our efforts over the past two years have been well spent.
How does it work? Marc gave us a quick demo of the device:
Marc and his team will be at the Vision Expo West this weekend demonstrating their device and you can find out more about the product on the Smartvision Labs website.
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great. Looks similar to the Dhristi initiative : http://drishticare.org/aboutus.html
Fantastic and much needed technology in many countries. I hope that one day the technology will be sufficient to put this into the hands of nurses and possibly others – with the device identifying situations that require an optometrist exam and providing the prescription for the rest.
Can the samsung do that? NO!
Who gives a fick, really.
Is this product used in the US?
In the future it may be…
I was just pointing out this useful, portable tool that was made so that it could actually benefit people.
Wow! Apple please help this project.
Very impressive and desperately needed. I have volunteered to help a wonderful charitable organization by the name of the Sumba Foundation (http://www.sumbafoundation.org), which helps the people of the Indonesian island of Sumba, one of the most remote and poor places on earth.
Sumba is located near the equator, and in addition to having a high concentration of malaria, a surprising number of people on the island suffer from cataracts, caused in no small part by how strong the sun is there, in addition to malnutrition and disease that exacerbate the problem. Each year, volunteers from the US, Australia and Europe come to Sumba to help the Foundation with a number of projects, from digging deep water wells to distributing mosquito nets to performing eye exams in clinics built by the foundation. Twice each year, a team of eye surgeons come to Sumba to perform cataract and other eye surgeries. To see how peoples lives are changed by having their vision restored is nothing short of remarkable.
To know there is an inexpensive and easy to use tool for field eye exams in places like Sumba could be a game changing advance.
To learn more, there’s a great documentary video on the Sumba Foundation, showing how they are treating cataracts plaguing its people:
http://vimeo.com/78846934
This product could help bring down the cost of eye care in developed as well as developing countries alike. I hope this team can get the technology out, and distributed ASAP.
Erm…..Auto-refraction is a productivity tool for Optometrists, allows optoms to find the average reading of the user. However, there is still a need for subjective refraction to ascertain the correct V.A of the patient. You cannot just point and click and obtain the value just like that, even if its with a wavefront technology and especially when its so unstable without a chin-rest