11 St Andrews Pl
London NW1 4LE
UK
Thirty-nine million people in the world are blind, and the majority lose their sight due to curable and preventable conditions. Millions more are held back because they don’t live near eye health facilities or can’t access treatment.
But how do you test and treat people who live in remote areas, where one eye doctor might serve a population of 2 million people and expensive, bulky eye equipment is hard to come by?
Dr Andrew Bastawrous, winner of the Royal Photographic Society Combined Royal Colleges Medal 2017, CEO of Peek Vision, and Associate Professor of International Eye Health at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, reveals how smartphones may be the ingenious solution.
Dr Bastawrous tells the story of Peek Vision, which has developed a cost-effective portable smartphone eye camera and app to help identify people with eyesight problems and connect them to local health workers.
Peek’s smartphone-based technology also generates data which enables health care providers to supply cost-effective, targeted treatment. This fascinating lecture explains how the programme has grown from a PhD research project to an internationally-adopted national programme in just five years.
The Combined Royal Colleges Lecture 2018 is being held at the Royal College of Physicians and will commence at 6.30pm on 15 November 2018.