Student develops low-cost eye-examination tool

Rose spent some time studying and working in Ecuador, in 2015 . One day, a group of medical students from other universities had set up a makeshift clinic, but it was closing — and all the optometry equipment had been packed away.

An old man came to get glasses but as there were plenty of glasses, there was no way to test the man’s vision to determine his prescription. This is what made Rose think of a solution.

“Meeting the old man when I was 18, it really affected me and I never forgot it. But I never thought to solve it until I was a junior and I was 21, and then suddenly it just hit me: This is the right thing to do”, she explained.

Then, with the help of three of her classmates, the girl created VisionFinder, an eye-examination tool that is not only convenient but relatively inexpensive to build and thus ideal for developing countries.

This hand-held device was produced at the university campus with a cost of about 100 USD.

It works like a phoropter, the optometrist’s tool that shows a patient how the world would look through different lenses. It was inspired by the famous View-Master toy that “plays” a reel of three-dimensional images, a different one appearing every time the person presses a lever.

The team applied for a provisional patent and Rose hopes to find a nonprofit organisation to adopt this solution. She said she passed on a potential deal with a startup that had capital but no infrastructure to deliver eyeglasses to developing countries, her this his her priority.

The team has sold, up to 2017, three VisionFinders to a foundation and a clinic.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/31PguiE