We
all want to have a clear picture of important events and see things sharply in
focus, but we aren’t always lucky enough for that to be the case. Also as we
get older, our arms have to get longer to read the small print. So it’s off to
the optometrist that we have to go and out comes that array of expensive kit to
gives a few numbers that are the key to our future clarity of vision.
That
process is becoming so last century now that Pamplona et al from MIT have
launched a start-up using a smartphone app with some cheap optics. $2 for the
optics puts this device in the offer you can’t refuse category – if your
eye-care specialist has a smartphone, which they will allow you to play with
the buttons to align green and red lines (1).
The
big expense then comes in choosing the designer frames to go with the lenses. I
have a dream of cheap accurate lenses being printed out while you wait using a
3-D printer. Perhaps they could printout the frames at the same time. Soon we’ll
all be seeing clearly by smartphone.
But
that’s not all! There is more. A sister app uses a similar system which scans
the eye to measure the extent and progression of cataracts (2). Of course, the
elimination of cataracts can’t be remedied by buying the right pair of reading
glasses, but the quick, simple and cheap quantitative diagnosis is a great
advance.
