For those of you who would not know, NETRA in most Indian Languages means Eyesight, A few months back I had shared a concept of few guys trying to give a new vision to change the world, quite literally when scientists came out with oil filled glasses which were of course a bit revolutionary, However there might be a need still to do a check if the person needs some corrective glasses. And while looking for Innovative Applications for my new Nexus One, I stumbled upon the new breakthrough from MIT Labs, a new device out of MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group utilizes one of the most rapidly proliferating technologies in the developing world – mobile phones – to make the diagnostic process of refractive errors of the eye, including nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, and age-related vision loss, both affordable and accessible to underprivileged populations. NETRA (Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment) uses a phone’s LCD display and intelligent software to administer a quick, effective and accurate vision test that patients can perform at home.

There are two standard ways of determining a patient’s corrective eye wear prescription. One involves looking through a large, clunky device fitted with various lenses swung before the eye until the one that produces the clearest image is found. The other shines a laser into the eye, using an array of tiny lenses to measure the patient’s vision characteristics. But in the developing world, access to these diagnostic systems is both extremely limited and prohibitively expensive.

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While the Android OS is being used by developers to deliver information and entertainment, the guys over at MIT are using the open platform to help bring the world into focus.The application and optical box work together to display two separate lines on the handset’s screen which represent your retinal focal points.  At its most basic application, the NETRA test consists of a small plastic device clipped onto the phone’s screen. The patient looks into a tiny lens, presses the phone’s arrow keys to make a set of parallel green and red lines overlap, bringing view into sharp focus, and repeats this eight times for each eye as the lines appear at different angles. Software loaded onto the phone then provides the precise prescription data. It may sound laborious, but the entire process takes under two minutes. Now, MIT’s optometry app may be able to tell you how bad your sight is, but it’s probably not going to be replacing your optometrist any time soon.  From what we can tell, this technology does not measure astigmatism and certainly doesn’t get a readout of how healthy or unhealthy your eyes really are.

The device uses an optical system derived from one some team members developed last year as a way of producing tiny barcodes (called Bokode) that could provide a large amount of information. Raskar explains that he had demonstrated that barcode device to many people, but when he showed it to his wife she had trouble seeing its patterns. He quickly realized that others he had shown it to had been wearing their glasses or contact lenses, but his wife had been looking into it directly and it had revealed the imperfections in her vision. “I said, ‘Wow, maybe you don’t need such an expensive device’” as those presently being used to test people’s vision, Raskar recalls.

Check out the videos below to get a better idea of the system:

I’m pretty sure that the application that MIT developed could work on other platforms, but MIT’s hopes of having the technology dispersed to developing countries to bring low-cost vision correction to the impoverished people of the world truly ties in with the openness and the variety of devices available on the Android platform. More information can be accessed at the project page here.