Check Your Eyesight On Mobile!

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Now you can detect refractive defects of the eye in less than two minutes using your mobile phone! Can you believe this? Yes, a low-cost device has been developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab which saves you from paying a visit to the ophthalmologist. The project was led by Ramesh Raskar, an assistant professor with the Camera Culture Lab.

The device is called Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment, or NETRA, Sanskrit for ‘eye’, and it can be clipped on to a phone with the requisite software installed on it. The device uses the phone display to run tests and generate a prescription in less than two minutes.
The device, NETRA can only be used with a high-resolution cell phone display for the time being. The patient just have to look into the tiny lens of a small plastic device clipped onto the phone’s screen, and press the arrow keys of the phone to set parallel green and red lines overlap, bringing view into sharp focus and this has to repeated eight times for each eye as the lines appear at different angles and soon you will have the status of your eyesight displayed on your phone’s screen.