British Smartphone Eye-exam App Hoping to Reach Millions of Blind Worldwide

Thirty-nine million people are blind across the world. An estimated 80 percent of those cases were preventable, through proper diagnosis and medical care – if it was available.

Now, a British team of eye specialists are hoping to attach the diagnostic tools onto an iPhone, in the hope it will reach the people in medically underserved areas of the globe, they said.

“PEEK,” which stands for portable eye examination kit, is a 3-D-printed attachment that can be attached to an iPhone, and which allows for a full complement of eye-exam tools, they said.

PEEK provides the basics to diagnose eye defects and disease. It provides an eye chart exam, as well as a side-by-side comparison between the corrected and uncorrected vision to the patient. And it also provides a scan of the retina and the back of the eye, to find deeper problems.

The vast majority of the millions of blindness cases worldwide can be treated – whether it’s uncorrected refractive errors, cataracts or glaucoma, according to the World Health Organization.

The PEEK team, who recently presented their app at a TED Talk, said getting the examination tool to the low-income areas could benefit millions of the sightless.

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“It is incredibly simple, and yet it will change the way we look at eyes,” said Mario Giardini, the hardware lead for the company.

The company has already started taking pre-orders for PEEK, which is expected to be released later this year. An Indiegogo campaign that raised more than 130,000 British pounds to develop the technology closed just month, after easily exceeding its target goal.

Other diagnostic uses for smartphones have included using them as low-cost microscopes, in settings from the classroom to medically underserved areas.