A new perspective of refractive error calculation with mobile application

Abstract

In many situations, not standardized and limited access to eye health care in several regions of Indonesia becomes the main challenge for myopia patients to measure and monitor their current refractive error condition. Many apps were proposed to provide low-cost alternative measurement tools rather than expensive tools such as Phoropter with Snellen chart and Retinoscopy, but still, those apps need an Internet connection and manually complex steps to operate. These conditions make myopia patients reluctant to use this kind of service. In this regard, we propose an intuitive diopter level measurement app based on mobile application setup, which implements the concept of measure the user face to smartphone screen distance for the rapid diopter calculation processes and at the same time provides a low-cost alternative refractive measurement tool. This paper highlights our experiences when developing a mobile application that can help patients with myopia measuring their blur line distances and evaluate their diopter levels independently. We conduct a number of human trials with the device on a controlled environment to demonstrate the ability of the proposed app to measure the diopter level. The experimental results show that the proposed app is quite successful in measuring the diopter level of myopia patients with a relatively small range of calculation errors compared to optometrist measurement results.