Click to play videoNew Delhi: There is a new use of the mobile phone, thanks to Indian researchers in the US. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in US are using a mobile phone and a small piece of plastic to check eyes.
"Imagine if you can use your mobile phone, hold it close to your eye, click on a few buttons and get the prescription for your glasses," says Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab.
It's called Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment (NETRA). A small plastic device is clipped to the front of the mobile phone and when one looks through it, a special software generates the patterns.
Looking at the patterns flexes one's eye muscles, as they try to form an image on the retina. By measuring how difficult it is for the person using the application, to make the patterns perfectly overlap, the software judges how weak the eyes are.
"What's great about our technique is that it needs no moving parts. And all the intelligence is in the software. So we can make it really cheap and accessible," says Ankit Mohan, Research Associate, MIT Media Lab.
The plastic pieces cost about Rs 100. But mass production could bring the cost down dramatically and make the new system ideal for use in far flung rural areas, especially in India.
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