Poor Vision? There's an App For That

necro81 writes "Researchers at MIT's Media Lab have developed a smartphone app that allows users to measure how poor their vision is (myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism) and receive a corrective prescription. The user peers through a $2 optical adapter at the screen of a smartphone. The app displays lighted bars, and prompts the user to adjust the display until the bars line up. Repeating this with bars in different locations and orientations allows the vision distortion to be determined to within about 0.4 diopters using a Nexus One. The iPhone 4, with its higher-resolution display, should be able to improve that to 0.28 diopters. This could have broad application in the developing world, where experienced opticians and diagnostic equipment are hard to come by."

Comments

So....

[abigsmurf]

This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?

Re:Which developing world?

[DWMorse]

Nobody said a steady 3G connection was required for this sort of use, or that for every person using the app, they had to own the device.

Even an iPhone 4 is a ton more mobile than a phoroptor, and a lot less expensive, since phoroptors clock in around $5,000 and take a trained professional to use.

A sole traveling, untrained, non-optometrist Peace Corps kid with an iPhone 4 and a box of donated used glasses could make a big damn difference.

Not just great for developing countries

[CastrTroy]

Not only is it great for developing countries. It's great for those of us in countries like the USA, Canada, Easter Europe, and many other places. Health care costs are increasing. It's about time we came up with some ways to make health care cheaper. My province spends half of it's revenue on health care. I would love for them to start using ideas like this to make it possible for lower skilled people who demand less money to give medical care in simple cases such as prescribing glasses, so that doctor's have more time for real important stuff and also so that health care costs would go down. With all the advancements in science it seems that health care is just getting more and more expensive. Really, we should be using those advancements to make it cheap and accessible to all.