Husna, Amity University Kolkata
Uncorrected refractive errors (URE) are a common cause of vision loss in children and affects almost 12.8 million children worldwide. Myopia (short-sightedness) is the most common eye-defect which can be severe if not corrected and 80-90% urban children suffer from myopic vision due to lack of time spent outdoors. Hypermetropia (long-sightedness) can be resolved in children by around the age of 10 years. Astigmatism (distorted vision) affects all age groups and doesn’t change over time.
The errors can be corrected by wearing spectacles which can improve the vision of eyes, academic performance, and quality of life. However, there’s a lot of stigmas associated with spectacle wear. Parents feel that wearing spectacles will weaken their child’s eyes. Some perceive no benefit in wearing them and some are also being teased or bullied and feel unimportant by wearing them.
An analysis was done in government and public-funded schools in Hyderabad, India for spreading awareness among all children and parents of affected children and to increase the spectacle-wear. This was a free examination and spectacles were provided free of cost. The analysis was performed by mobile phone technology which is a rapidly increasing area in health care, including eye care and school eye health programmes.
A recent development is the Portable Eye Examination Kit (Peek) which consists of smartphone applications and software which is specially designed for eye health check-up and vision screening in low-resource settings. It has a vision simulator application which detects the blurry vision, and the obtained data is entered in a smartphone which helps in eye health analysis. Peek Sim images explaining the blurry vision is generated and can be printed.
The Peek School Eye Health system can track children with defective vision through the entered data, the system also collects contact details and send SMS, voice messages and images to parents. It generates a list of children and refers them to optometrists or hospital. Referral notifications and health education messages that are locally developed are sent to parents. In Kenya by using this system there was a two and a half times increase in the uptake of referrals to the eye care providers and the proportion of children wearing spectacles was higher as compared to standard care. It was also demonstrated that teachers could be taught to detect visual impairment using Peek Acuity, so classroom teaching was included as teasing is also a common reason why children do not wear spectacles in schools.
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Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30338-2/fulltext Effectiveness of novel mobile health (PEEK) and education intervention on spectacle wear amongst children in India: Results from a randomized superiority trial in India
Well done appi keep it up.👌👍
Helpful research…keep going on