Doctor invents affordable and accessible ophthalmic equipment

Dr. Hong Sheng Chiong is an ophthalmologist in New Zealand. While doing clinical practices in Kenya and Nepal, Dr. Hong was shocked by the limited tertiary eye care as well as poor hygiene and conditions of local hospitals and clinics. “It is far too often we see patients being mistreated for their eye conditions at the community level”, he said.

So the doctor developed insight on fighting preventable blindness, and realized there was an urgent need for a cheap and accessible solution to eliminate the gap for eye care in the primary sector – a portable eye detection device available at the primary eye clinics globally, especially those in the regions with limited economic and medical conditions.

Dr. Hong believes that a picture of the eye is always better than a thousand words. He was considering using the smartphone as a diagnostic tool for the eye. He learned product design and coding by himself, and experimented on fish eyes, his wife and even his son. In 2014, along with a few medical and 3D printing design specialists, Dr. Hong co-founded oDocs, a social enterprise start-up helping optometrists identify eye damage and restore eyesight to the blind, using smartphones. The group managed to come up with a functional prototype for asmartphone-based retinal camera.

The invention, oDocs Fundus, is the first open source smartphone ophthalmoscope in the world. Anyone can print out the components and assemble them into a smartphone adaptable retinal imaging device. The price is as lower as 20 USD, only 1% of the cost of professional devices. The product design had been downloaded by over 10,000 ophthalmologists around the world. oDocs has also received numerous awards in New Zealand and in other countries.

Adapted from:
https://nzentrepreneur.co.nz/dr-hong-sheng-chiong-odocs/