Last night, while cruising the net I came across a really neat gadget  for DIY sight tests. The gadget hasn’t got a name yet, nor is it avalable for purchase yet. So what exactly is this little beauty all about? In essence it is a small and very simple plastic attachment for your mobile phone, with which, provided you have the appropriate software, you could perform a simple sight test to estimate your visual acuity and the resulting estimated refractive error of your eye. The good news is that the gadget costs less than US$2 and could be usefull in remote parts of underdeveloped countries where sophisticated equipment for comprehensive eye examinations is just not available. The bad news is, that it is not a substitute for the traditional compehensive eye examination since it is designed to do only one small and simple task – estimating a refractive error based on the user’s information input. Eye conditions other than myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism and presbyopia cannot be detected.

Here is how it works: The patient looks through a small lens and presses the arrow key of the phone until a set of parallel green and red lines overlap. This has to be done eight times for each eye. Every time the lines are presented at different angles. After eight repetitions for each eye, where the lines are displayed at different angles, the device calculates the refractive error which. The result, according to the developers studies, is comparable to that of conventional sight testing equipment like phoropters and aberrometers.

In summary, it looks like a great little device that could be very useful in many places, but in particular in areas where sight tests have not been possible in the past due to high cost of equipment and/or lack of facilities (as is the case in remote underdeveloped areas of the world).

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