Joshua Silver, a physics professor at Oxford University, has created a solution to bringing affordable glasses to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2020. His invention is a pair of glasses composed of plastic lenses with clear sacs of fluid sandwiched in between. The wearer can then adjust the amount of fluid in the sacs through a syringe to fit their prescription without the assistance of an optician.
30,000 pairs have already been distributed in 15 countries but the global need for basic sight-correction is estimated at more than half the world’s population. And in poor communities, the ability to see will improve literacy rates and will allow people to continue pursuing jobs even as their vision deteriorates with old age.
As with all great ideas with great ambition, scale, manufacturing, distribution issues abound, but I am rooting for this guy and for Adaptive Eyecare.
More good reading and information here.