NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

While providing charity eye care in Haiti, Joel Kassalow noticed that a single step in the process slowed everything else down. A complex eye-testing machine was essential, unwieldy and too costly to buy in multiples — and it became a bottleneck in giving people necessary care. Happily, the MIT-trained optometrist offered an innovation he’d created at his company, Smart Vision Labs: a version of the same machine at one-fiftieth the weight and one-hundredth of the cost.

The device, an autorefractor or wavefront aberrometer, is a small black box with a lens to cover a patient’s eye, mounted on a smartphone — a far cry from the massive metal machine now used to measure the errors in people’s vision. Kassalow and his co-inventor, Yaopeng Zhou, hope their device, the SVOne, will replace that bulky machine worldwide.