About half the people in the world need corrective lenses.

Yet when you travel in the developing world, very few people wear glasses or contact lenses. They can’t afford them.

Taxi drivers, bus drivers work “blind”. It’s terrifying!

Josh Silver, a retired physics professor at Oxford University, has developed what he calls “adaptive glasses”. His specs are made of “tough plastic with with silicone liquid in the lenses. When purchased, each lense will have a syringe attached to it, and the wearer will be able to adjust the amount of liquid in the lenses — which essentially changes the prescription — without the need for an optician.”

About 30,000 pairs of his glasses have been distributed in trials in Africa. They work.

They plan to sell these at $1 each.

… Silver calls his flash of insight a “tremendous glimpse of the obvious” – namely that opticians weren’t necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000.

The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor communities are enormous, says the scientist. Literacy rates improve hugely, fishermen are able to mend their nets, women to weave clothing. During an early field trial, funded by the British government, in Ghana, Silver met a man called Henry Adjei-Mensah, whose sight had deteriorated with age, as all human sight does, and who had been forced to retire as a tailor because he could no longer see to thread the needle of his sewing machine. “So he retires. He was about 35. He could have worked for at least another 20 years. We put these specs on him, and he smiled, and threaded his needle, and sped up with this sewing machine. He can work now. He can see.” …

Guardian – Inventor’s 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world’s poorest see better

official website – Adaptive Eyewear

(via Engadget)