EyeNetra

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Imagine if you could use your smartphone to get your eyes tested in less than a minute without visiting your ophthalmologist or without access to thousand dollars bulky diagnostic machines and laser scanners? That’s exactly what a team of researchers led by Ramesh Raskar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has devised – a small plastic lens that can be clipped to a cell phone screen, and a software that can accurately determine a person’s vision prescription on the spot, making quick, inexpensive diagnoses of refractive vision errors a reality, especially in remote areas.

Using EyeNetra is simple. The patient looks through a lens in the clip-on device at the cell phone’s screen, using the arrow keys on the phone’s keypad to move sets of parallel green and red lines around until they overlap. Do this eight times for each eye and the software in the phone can determine your prescription. The entire process takes no more than two minutes. The set is portable, and more importantly, very cheap. The package of the device and the mobile application is available for as low as $2 (less than Rs. 100 in Indian currency).

Since it is so cheap, and portable, it can be used in villages all over the world. In India alone, about 6% of the people wear glasses, but it is estimated that about 40% of them should be wearing them. That’s 200 million people in India who don’t have eye glasses that are needed.

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