A Kenyan doctor who works at the Kitale District Hospital is the man behind a new and cheaper eye test kit that uses a mobile phone.
Together with a team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dr Hillary Rono developed Peek, a mobile application used in smartphones that can conduct visual acuity, colour vision as well as lens and retina imaging.
During it's launch on Monday at Kilimani Primary School, the innovation was set to test around 300,000 pupils in Trans Nzoia County in the next three years.
According to Dr Rono, an opthalmologist, the app had already been used in the same county for one year, emphasizing that it was way cost effective than other machines.
"The use of this mobile app is 50 times cheaper than buying the eye testing machines," said Rono.
After screening, the patient is referred to a hospital, afterwhich the parents and school principal are informed of the diagnosis and treatment.
The records are kept in a Cloud-based data system.
