If you're like me, finding time to go to the eye doctor is near impossible. But since an exam amounts to looking at a bunch of symbols of various sizes on a screen, might it be possible to perform an eye exam on your cellphone? Some clever folks at MIT say yes.
The idea of performing an eye exam on your phone comes with a couple of caveats: The test requires you to clamp on a plastic peephole accessory in front of your phone's screen, and it's not exactly comprehensive — obviously there's no way to, say, look for retina damage (yet). But for a basic vision test it gets the job done. From the MIT researchers:
The test can be carried out using a small, plastic device clipped onto the front of a cellphone's screen. The patient looks into a small lens, and presses the phone's arrow keys until sets of parallel green and red lines just overlap. This is repeated eight times, with the lines at different angles, for each eye. The whole process takes less than two minutes, at which point software loaded onto the phone provides the prescription data.
Sounds awesomely efficient. Then if I could email that data right from the phone to an optician and have my glasses sent to me, even better. If this ever becomes an actual app, it pretty much names itself: iExam.
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