Smartphones monitoring glaucoma at home
News from our full member Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital – Melbourne
It was the simplicity of it that first struck Dr George Kong: an affordable device that many people already owned that could monitor visual fields for people with the chronic eye condition glaucoma and help avoid vision loss. And it could be done from the safety and convenience of home.
Dr Kong, a glaucoma specialist and general ophthalmologist at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital’s Department of Opthalmology, has, with collaborator Professor Algis Vingrys from Melbourne University’s Department of Opthalmology and Vision Science, developed an App which allows patients with glaucoma to monitor their visual fields on a simple iPad, reducing the need for patients to travel into a clinic.
“We were initially thinking it could be used as a portable visual field device to improve access to glaucoma care in remote locations,” Dr Kong says, “because you can take it anywhere quite easily as compared to the standard visual field machine that has a very large footprint and is difficult to manoeuvre. Then we realised that there were a lot of patients with iPads at home. We thought ‘Let’s see whether it’s possible for patients to take an iPad and do a visual field test at home.”