Author: Jim O Brien/CEO

Our mobiles not only make calls,send sms and allow access to the internet no more as we are quite aware of,almost daily there is some new idea or invention to add to our devices which is making mobile technology much more interesting and in some cases more resourceful than in house fixed tech we often see,today’s example is one of them callled “Peek Vision” also today we look at Peek Retina which is 2 years in the making and simply excellent stuff this.

A portable, easy-to-use vision app could be useful in settings where ophthalmologists might be scarce, like developing countries, or even for patients who want to monitor their eyesight at home, says Jeremy Keenan, an ocular infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco.

British ophthalmologist Andrew Bastawrous moved his family from London to Kenya in 2013 with $150,000 of equipment, a team of 15 people and an ambitious goal: to understand the causes of blindness in rural Africa. It didn’t take long before he encountered all sorts of obstacles, including unpredictable power supplies and the regular need to run a gas-fueled generator to keep the equipment going. Many of the villages he was trying to reach had no roads and no electricity.

285 million people in the world have vision impairment, 80 percent live in low-income countries. The vast majority have preventable or treatable conditions, like glaucoma or cataracts. By increasing access to simple and affordable eye tests, Bastawrous hopes to create awareness about eye conditions and, in turn, connect patients with vision-saving treatments.

The Peek vision test looks a little different. On the phone’s screen, patients see just one letter: an “E” that can be displayed with the prongs facing up, down, to the left or to the right. Patients don’t need to be able to read or to know the English alphabet. They just point a finger in the direction they see the E facing. If it looks like a “W,” for example, when pointing up.

The phone method has other advantages, he says, including more objectivity. While paper charts require an examiner to look frequently back and forth from the patient to the chart to check for accuracy, a test-giver holding a phone never has to make any assessments at all. The phone does all the work. And once the results are on a smartphone, they can be shared remotely with doctors who are not in the field. The app also performs retina scans and other kinds of vision tests that are undergoing their own trials.

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