Development of a Low-cost portable Autorefractor

Dr. Shivan R. Dave

Grant code: 

Awardee Organization: Plenoptika Inc (USA), Aurolab (India), Aravind Eye Care System (India)

Public Health Relevance Statement: 

Project Start Date: 2014

Project End Date: 2016

Total Funding: $500.000

MEDIC Personnel included in the grant / Role: Dr.Eduardo Lage / Consultant

Abstract Text: There are more than 1 billion people worldwide who are suffering from poor vision because they do not have the prescription eyeglasses they need – in India, this number is more than 130 million people. With the right pair of low priced eyeglasses, quality of life and productivity can be greatly improved. A major barrier to obtaining eyeglasses in low-resource settings is getting an accurate prescription. There is an acute shortage of trained optometrists to prescribe eyeglasses and current technologies for measuring a prescription require intensive training to use or are too expensive for widespread use. It is estimated India requires 112,000 optometrists to provide adequate eye care, however, currently there are only 9,000 optometrists.

We aim to improve eye care through the QuickSee – our innovative, inexpensive, handheld device that quickly prescribes corrective eyeglasses with the click of a button. While maintaining the current standard of care, this device will enable a ten-fold reduction in the time needed to measure an eye for corrective eyeglasses and can be used by technicians with minimal training. This disruptive technology breaks the tradeoff between price and training requirements that prohibits current devices from improving the prescription process in low-resource settings.