(a) Healthy eye (b) Myopia (c) Hyperopia
Figure 1: Common retinal refractive error in the human eye.
rate corrective lens.
For the above have a method of refractive error
screening ophthalmologists used optical technology
based diagnostic instruments such as auto refractome-
ter, focometer, retinoscopy, and wavefront analyzer
can be used for measuring the refractive power of the
human eye (Ko and Lee, 2006; Berger et al., 1993;
Dave, 2004) is bulky, expensive, sophisticated, highly
application specific and needs a trained technician to
operate these devices.
Recently, portable devices (smartphones and
tablets) have emerged as a versatile mobile computing
platform with high resolution display, which provides
us a new opportunity for mobile health (mHealth).
Paul et al. (Paul and Kumar, 2015) use the oph-
thalmoscope and mobile phone to develop an afford-
able fundus imaging based eye care device for glau-
coma screening. Peek Vision provides high qual-
ity tools for professional eye exams using a mobile
phone (PeekVision, 2015). It can be used to diagnose
cataracts, visual acuity and eyesight, colour and con-
trast of the eye. In (Pamplona et al., 2010; Cameracul-
ture.media.mit.edu, 2015), NETRA and CATRA pro-
vide affordable cell phone attachment that measure
the eye refractive power and cataracts information. It
creates an inverse Shack-Hartmann sensor based on
a ”high resolution programmable display and com-
bines inexpensive optical elements, interactive GUI,
and computational reconstruction”. Currently, Smart
Vision Labs have developed a smartphone based af-
fordable auto refraction technology based on Wave-
front aberrometry (Shack Hartmann) to measure the
refractive error of the eye (Zhou and Kassalow, 2010).
In this paper, we introduce a novel low cost, hand
held, portable, reliable, accurate and interactive in-
strument mNetra, based on view dependent display
to determine the refractive error in the human eye for
fast and accurate screening. The ophthalmoscope and
smart phone based device tries to get the best im-
age/video frame of the retinal scan after proper adjust-
ment of ophthalmoscope lens focusing wheel. This
paper presents,
• A methodology to do refraction of the eye for
screening using a mobile phone an ophthalmo-
scope.
• An Android based application has been devel-
oped, which allows collection of patient details
and perform the computation for refraction. A
generic Regression (R) model to demonstrate that
an off the shelf ophthalmoscope can be attached
to the mobile phone is also described in the paper.
We believe that our funduscopy based optometry
increase the usability and application of ophthalmo-
scope and mobile phone. It provides a suitable solu-
tion for affordable eye care in developing countries.
And this is particularly useful in prescribing correc-
tive lenses for patients who are unable to undergo a
subjective refraction that requires a judgment and re-
sponse from the patient (e.g. a person with communi-
cation problems or severe intellectual disabilities).
2 mNetra
The mNetra is a monocular, funduscopy based hand-
held optometry which uses the principle of ophthal-
moscopy to measure refractive error. The optician
uses the manual rotary wheel to focus the image on
the retina. This concept has been explored to do same
automated refraction in the mNetra. We describe the
methodology in the following subsection.
The Mobile ophthalmoscope is an optoelectron-
ics handheld, an affordable lightweight instrument for
screening the interior structure of the eye, especially
the back part of the eye (fundus: which includes
the retina, optical disk, optical cup, blood vessel and
fovea etc.). This also supports computation and com-
munication needs for processing and sharing of med-
ical data. This optoelectronic device has been made
possible by integrating the smartphone and an oph-
thalmoscope.
The total optical power of a multiple lens system
is equal to the linear summation of individual lens
power. In Fig. 4(b), ophthalmoscopy based screening
system’s optical unit consist of the ophthalmoscope,
subject (patient) eye and a camera rather than ophthal-
moscope, subject eye and observer eye (in Fig. 4(a)).
This new multiple lens optical system is in equilib-
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