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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."
Is there an app to bite my shiny metal ass?
This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?
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.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Great idea for the developed world too.
I'd like an app like that for Linux so people can test their vision at home, multiple times, and optimize prescriptions for different distances (for example, close work like soldering).
With the availability of an eye test app, people who know their eye health is good can refine their prescription cheaply (buying online instead of getting ass-raped for the same lens/frame combo locally) and save playing eye test/prescription/purchase roulette.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I thought Apple wouldn't approve stuff like that?
First, align your thermal laser etcher. Then align your eyeball. Then insert plastic sheet and print your eyeglasses. Do not operate with cover open!
Someone had to do it.
Oh wait, you have one with the galvanic skin response metering. Just use some nice phone with two well placed antennas, short them with the patient's bare skin and do the math on the signal's drop.
Yea, easier...
Lets bring heavy, delicate equipment out to a harsh environment that in all likelyhood lacks either repair parts or appropriate tools, and spend a fortune in time and energy moving the fucker around.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
A sole traveling, untrained, non-optometrist Peace Corps kid with a box of donated used glasses could bring a box of glasses.
You almost had it there. You did (almost) stumble blindly on it (no pun intended), but still...
1 - Based on the "Developing countries can't be choosers" axiom, it is not really THAT important to people living there if the eyeglasses really fit their prescription 100%.
Particularly, if the glasses are free.
2 - Based on 1, there is a much simpler way of testing for the right prescription under those conditions (choosers not too picky, choice rather limited anyway...).
It consists of the "patient" trying out several sets of glasses until he/she finds the one that works for him/her.
You know, like you would with a pair of sunglasses.
And, based on my own day-to-day observation from what you might call a "developing nation" (Bosnia) that model works perfectly well even for the paying customers.
E.g. people who can't really afford money to visit a private optometrist or they lack time or health insurance for a visit to a government one.
All of those cases mostly resulting from the case of being employed "off the books".
Only thing is... There is really no need for donated eyeglasses cause Chinese ones are dirt cheap.
Like, plastic sunglasses prices. Often sold side by side on the same stand.
Sure, if you have a rather specific need (different prescription for each eye, or a relatively rare case of visual impairment) you are probably not gonna find what you are looking for "over the counter".
Then again, chances of finding EXACTLY what you need in a "box of donated used glasses" with or without an eyePhone (Get it? EYE-PHONE!) are far lower than that.
Oh... and one more thing.
While there are plenty enough iPhones here (just today I saw one "barely used" 3G 16GB being sold for ~320$) - ALL of them are jailbroken.
Also, you can forget using the app store directly from it even if you have somehow gotten your hands on an actual "virgin" iPhone.
Cause even if your iPhone is perfectly legal, with no cracking/jailbreaking attached - your money is no good.
So, that "non-optometrist Peace Corps kid" should better get all his app-needs before going on his "mission of mercy".
If any of those apps need to "call home", well... sucks to be him in the "developing world".
Again, this is one of those inventions that are pitched by people who have either never been outside of a developed "1st world" country, OR who have only ever been to some village in the middle of the African jungle so they base their understanding of every "developing country" on that one experience or on what they see on CNN. Or in the movies.
Invention is then being pitched as intended for developing countries - where in reality there is no demand or need for it.
On the other hand, hypochondriacs and "I_am_my_own_wikipedia-diagnostician"-people will probably love it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
http://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses.html
It's not even CLOSE to trivial to bring in expensive and bulky equipment to the third world.
I live and volunteer in Honduras, and when one of the projects I work with needs something, one of the primary constraints is how do we get it here. Any piece of equipment that can do the same job and can be brought in with airline luggage will ALWAYS be preferable to something that have to be shipped.
A couple of examples: Someone was kind enough to donate 20 complete new computes (monitor, keyboard etc) to one of the schools I work with. They even paid for shipping it down here. This was a year and a half ago, the container they came in is still sitting at the port it came in to, we could never get customs to clear the shipment. (The general assumption is that they were stolen and customs won't clear it so we don't find out.)
Second example: The medevac service I work with has a Sikorsky S62A, one of very few in the world that still fly. They needed a couple of brackets for the steps, nothing fancy, total cost when new: about 15 bucks, but it's not something you can go down and pick up at the corner store. The owners of the helicopter had a few of them in Australia that they picked up surplus off the USCG when they retired the fleet. So the service paid to have them shipped in, total cost counting shipping and customs: just under 1000USD.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the third world just doesn't work anything close to they way you think it does. If, for whatever reason I needed to bring in equipment to fit people for lenses, and I had the option of a donated piece of professional equipment vs a iPhone that I had to raise money for, I'd pick the iPhone every time.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
No need for the donated used glasses...
There's at least two sides to that:
(1) the glasses mentioned in your link have limited application where the wearer has comparatively complex issues such as astigmatism, and
(2) many glasses donation programs have been shut down. I recently attempted to offload a few pairs of old-prescription glasses here in Western Australia, only to be informed that such programs were now regarded as counter-productive at best. As a result, they ended up in the bin. I can actually understand the reasoning behind this, but it is a bit disappointing to have to thus discard something that had obvious value.
I know a couple of people who actually drive cars wearing those damn things. Scary.