Newton Fund - Automated Telemedicine Enabled Screening for Eye Diseases Using an Affordable and Simple to Use Smartphone Based Imaging Device

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There are nearly 285m people worldwide with visual impairments and nearly 90% of this is in developing countries. 80% suffer from one or more forms of preventable blindness. A country like India has a significant population at risk of blindness due to acute conditions such as cataract and corneal diseases (estimated at nearly 19m) and a significant population at risk for blindness due to chronic conditions like glaucoma, AMD and diabetic retinopathy (estimated at nearly 21m). Year-on-year increase in burden is estimated at nearly 18%.The low specialist doctor-patient ratio in India of 1:8300, necessitates the need to implement programmes for decentralised screening for eye health. Such models require an affordable, easy to use, portable imaging device that is telemedicine-enabled to allow for remote capture of images, together with an automated software that allows non-specialists to triage patients screened based on the sensitive detection of clinically relevantpathologies. This application seeks to build the world's first fully automated, portable disease detection and triaging device in screening for eye health - at a fraction of the cost of existing desktop technologies.