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The Technology

Around one fifth of any group of people will need vision correction to get the best acuity (ie. image sharpness or accuracy) their eyes can achieve. As a population get older, this fraction also rises, as a condition known as presbyopia develops. Presbyopia is caused by a diminution in the power of accommodation of the crystalline lens. For example, it has been estimated that around 89 million people in the USA are presbyopic, and this number rises as the average age of the population increases.

The starting point for the development of Adaptive Eyecare's technology was the astonishing statistic that according to the World Health Organization there are currently around one billion people - including 10% of school children - in the world who would benefit from vision correction, but are as yet uncorrected. Most of these people live in the developing world, and the problem arises principally because the numbers of personnel trained to deliver vision correction in the conventional way are simply inadequate to meet the needs of the people. These statistics have profound implications - they mean that hundreds of millions of adults do not have the vision correction they need to be socially and economically active, and many children are educationally and socially disadvantaged.

The approach of Adaptive Eyecare has been to develop a completely new ophthalmic lens technology which permits us to manufacture revolutionary new spectacles which are universal, in the sense that one pair may be used to correct the vision of over 90% of people requiring correction. The special feature is that the wearer can adjust the power of each lens to his or her own requirements - this is particularly useful for developing world populations in areas which do not have adequate numbers of those specially trained personnel normally associated with the provision of vision correction.

The lenses in Adaptive Eyecare's spectacles operate in a manner which is somewhat similar in its optical function to the crystalline lens in the human eye - our lenses have the feature that the curvature of the lens surfaces is under the control of the wearer of the spectacles, and a simple manual adjustment is all that is needed to vary the power of each lens. In use, the wearer adjusts each lens so as to get clearest vision. This process takes less than a minute for both eyes. Having found the best setting, the lenses are then set, and the ancillary device used for lens adjustment is removed and discarded.

Adaptive Eyecare's adaptive lenses are fluid- filled and the power is changed by varying the amount of fluid in the lens. The power range of our lenses is +6 to -6 Dioptres, and the optical quality is similar to that of the typical human eye.