India's leading engineering institute IIT Madras has a Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC), a unit of the Research and Development, that has come up with a new affordable eye screening technology called 'Eye PAC' that helps ophthalmologists do their work faster. Up till now, patients with eye problems had to spend a whole day at the hospital for just the screening. With what they've developed here, the process takes just five minutes. Eye PAC is a software that extracts clear information from eyes and in turn help screen a large number of patients and send only the needy ones for further treatment. Thus, the eye doctor can focus on giving immediate diagnostic solutions.
HTIC unit's head Mr. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam shared his concern by saying that "Over 80 per cent of cases of blindness in our country are preventable, if only there was no lack of qualified ophthalmologists." Therefore, using the Eye PAC technology what we essentially achieve is the bridging of gap of the shortage of ophthalmologists in the country.
The IIT's HTIC unit has worked on this project by collaborating with the Department of Biotechnology of Government of India. This project also supports '3nethra' -a low cost, portable, and highly integrated ophthalmology device for pre-screening and identification of potential eye diseases, developed by Bangalore-based med-tech firm Forus Health. 3nethra has been already installed in many locations across 10 countries such as India, China, France, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mauritius and Somalia. As we frequently read about the i-tech innovation across the world, in India we are seeing a lot of eye-tech innovation. Recently, we saw how four engineering students from Srinivas Institiute Of Technology, Mangalore came up with 'Eye Mouse' - a hands-free device that aims at letting the differently abled people use mouse on their computer screen in hands-free mode.
We look forward to more innovative solutions from India's leading technical institutes and organisations. What are your opinions? Share with us in comments.
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