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Low vision in children has been making their and parents life difficult day by day. According to WHO, around 1 billion people, including children, are visually impaired. Rehabilitation technique has been known for many years for the treatment of low vision in children. Due to Covid-19, there are severe disruption of low vision rehabilitation in many countries including United Kingdom and Covid-19 has led to an increase in demand of low vision rehabilitation. But did we ever wonder that what if technology could act as a virtual rehabilitation centre and help thousands of children visually impaired? What if our smartphones could help us with the rehabilitation for low vision?
As we all know, technology is available everywhere. Imagine if our phones would be able to help with rehabilitation, we do not need to travel to hospital miles away and waste our time in travelling. You also do not need to wait for appointments which would also mean saving time. There are loads of assistive technologies and software to help low vision patients with their daily lives. For instance, screen-reading software like JAWS to read aloud the content, magnification software like magic and a lot more. However, there are no applications which offer visual stimulation programs for your child which could be used from anywhere.
Therefore, we created a mobile application, known as “can-eye”, which would help to develop your child’s vision by offering various visual stimulation exercises. The application has three modules and depending upon your child’s issue, our app will recommend a module for your child. ”can-eye”s activities revolve around lights, colours, shapes and games, which are fun and stimulating for children, while helping to develop their vision and cognitive skills. It was developed by engineers working in close collaboration with medical doctors, including neonatologists, ophthalmologists and occupational therapists, in order to develop functional exercises for infants and children which offer early vision-specific developmental support.
Furthermore, because of Covid-19, technologies are helping billions of people more than ever before in every industrial sector. Hospitals and clinics are struggling with scheduling appointments for children with low vision which is why they are lacking rehabilitation (visual stimulation) that they require to improve vision. We believe that rehabilitation in early stages would help with the development of your child’s vision and their future. This is where “can-eye” comes to play as it provides various visual stimulation exercises for your child and it can be used from anywhere at any time.
To sum up, technology can act as a virtual rehabilitation centre and help thousands of children with visual impairment. Thankfully, we have created “can-eye” application which is a mobile application which provides various type of visual stimulation exercises for visually impaired children which are fun and enjoyable which would help to develop your child’s vision and prevent low vision from developing further. “can-eye” aims to help thousands of children with low vision, improve their lifestyle and create bright future for them.