Embedded Lab

Ebin Philip is participating in Hack A Day Prize 2016 with his Open Indirect Ophthalmoscope, which is an open source, affordable, and portable screening device for capturing quality retinal images.

Diabetic Retinopathy is a complication of diabetes causing damage to the retina, eventually leading to blindness. The cost of state of the art retinal imaging devices required for identifying this disorder lies in the range $10,000 – $25,000. This makes them inaccessible for the population in rural areas or developing countries. We aim to develop a device under $400 which can provide reasonable quality retinal images to clinicians.

Currently there are over 422 million people worldwide suffering from diabetes. 28.5% of them suffer from Diabetic Retinopathy(1) . 50% of diabetics are unaware about the risk of losing their vision(2). The number of cases of diabetic retinopathy increased from 4 million in 2000 to 7.69 million in 2010 in US alone. Early detection and Treatment can help prevent loss of vision in most cases.

Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy, requires expensive devices for Retinal Imaging , even the cheapest of them costing more than $9000 each. This makes good quality eyecare, expensive and inaccessible to the less privileged. The key idea in the development of OIO(code-named Project OWL) is to provide an affordable solution to help identify DR and hence prevent cases of “avoidable blindness”.