Project Overview

Joshua Silver realized that optometrists couldn't reach all the people in the world who need spectacles, but technology could allow them to determine their own prescriptions and customize glasses to suit themselves. 10,000 pairs of his adaptive spectacles have already been manufactured in China and distributed to people in Africa who need them (video).

Problem Addressed

There are around a billion people in the world - including 10% of schoolchildren - who need but don't have spectacles. Most live in the developing world, and the situation arises because there are too few eye care professionals to meet the needs of the people globally. Without glasses, people often lose their ability to work as they grow older, and many thousands of school children can't see well enough to read and learn their lessons. 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.

Technology Solution

Joshua Silver invented low-cost glasses that can be tuned by the wearer. These ingenious spectacles have "adaptive lenses," which consist of two thin membranes with liquid between them. The wearer simply looks at an eye chart and pumps in more or less fluid to change the curvature of the lens, which adjusts the prescription. 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. The power range of the adaptive lenses is +6 to -6 Diopters, and the optical quality is similar to that of the typical human eye.