oDocs
Smartphone Ophthalmoscope allows eye exam access in developing nations
Orange County, CA - May 31st 2017 - Dr. Hong Sheng Chiong has developed a camera able to fit over a smartphone to bring eye exams directly to patients in developing countries. Dr. Hong first realized his passion for curing preventable blindness while on a medical attachment to Kenya as a med student. In 2015, Dr. Hong gave a presentation at a TedX talk conference in Auckland releasing the following statistics: 285 million people live with visual impairments. 39 million people are completely blind. 90% of those visually impaired people live in developing countries. 80% of those cases are preventable. This spurred Dr. Hong’s incentive to invent the oDocs Eye Care smartphone eye camera.
The company, oDocs, based in New Zealand, is the brain child of Dunedin Hospital-based ophthalmology registrar Dr. Hong, along with his co-founder Dr. Benjamin O’Keeffe, senior house officer of the Ophthalmology department at Wellington Hospital. Starting in 2014, the project worked to perfect the camera and rid the device of any inconsistencies. In 2017, three years later, oDocs Eye Care won the prestigious award for New Zealand’s Most Innovative Mobile Technology Company.
The device is a retinal image adapter, also called visoScope. When the adapter is attached to a smartphone, it magnifies the device’s camera and turns it into a retinal camera. When an ophthalmologist conducts an eye exam, they look through the pupil to see to the back of the eye, which is enclosed and impossible to see with the naked eye. The back of the eye can give insight into a myriad of blinding diseases such as diabetes and glaucoma. Dr. Hong wanted to make these essential eye exams readily available to the public; thus, he created the lens to go over a smartphone- something a majority of people carry with them throughout the day.
Upon the release of his camera, Dr. Hong stated his focus for the device stemmed from the driving factors of cost, mobility, and accessibility. “We have made them extremely affordable and accessible to benefit regions most in need. Conventional equipment would cost around $20,000 to $30,000, whereas our devices cost a hundredth of that,” said Dr. Hong. Additionally, oDocs has promised to keep their invention open-sourced, meaning the original software is available to all and may be redistributed and modified.
In order to maintain accessibility, Dr. Hong made this invention compatible with 3D printing. In his 2015 Ted talk, Dr. Hong said, “We’re releasing the patents for free; making it the first open-source eye equipment in the world. Anyone around the world could just download the files, make the necessary amendments for improvement, and resubmit it for the better good of the community. Better still the device we’ve created is compatible with 3D printing- so literally anyone… could have a fundus camera on the other side of the globe.” Dr. Hong and his team are making progress in the discovery of a cure for preventable blindness. Eye clinic equipment, though common in developed nations, is not easily accessible in non-developed nations due to its cumbersome size and expensive cost. Dr. Hong notes, “Ultimately, it’s not just a simple camera that we’re building. We’re building an ecosystem that transforms all the eye equipment that you need in an eye clinic into simple, affordable, and portable equipment so anyone around the world doesn’t have to go blind.”