[wordup] Do It Yourself Glasses

[Adam Shand]

Via: "Amy Shand" <amy at shand...>
Via: http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/brilliant_waterbased_eyeglasses_for_the_masses_no_optician_required_12220.asp
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable-glasses-josh-silver

Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see  
betterProfessor pioneers DIY adjustable glasses that do not need an  
optician

By Esther Addley
The Guardian, Monday 22 December 2008

It was a chance conversation on March 23 1985 ("in the afternoon, as I  
recall") that first started Josh Silver on his quest to make the  
world's poor see. A professor of physics at Oxford University, Silver  
was idly discussing optical lenses with a colleague, wondering whether  
they might be adjusted without the need for expensive specialist  
equipment, when the lightbulb of inspiration first flickered above his  
head.
What if it were possible, he thought, to make a pair of glasses which,  
instead of requiring an optician, could be "tuned" by the wearer to  
correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring  
affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?

More than two decades after posing that question, Silver now feels he  
has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is  
breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable - to  
offer glasses to a billion of the world's poorest people by 2020.

Some 30,000 pairs of his spectacles have already been distributed in  
15 countries, but to Silver that is very small beer. Within the next  
year the now-retired professor and his team plan to launch a trial in  
India which will, they hope, distribute 1 million pairs of glasses.

The target, within a few years, is 100 million pairs annually. With  
the global need for basic sight-correction, by his own detailed  
research, estimated at more than half the world's population, Silver  
sees no reason to stop at a billion.

If the scale of his ambition is dazzling, at the heart of his plan is  
an invention which is engagingly simple.

Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that  
the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device's  
tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid,  
each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm  
of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of  
fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the  
wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed  
by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is  
so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance  
people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own  
prescription.

Silver calls his flash of insight a "tremendous glimpse of the  
obvious" - namely that opticians weren't necessary to provide glasses.  
This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained  
specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one  
optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is  
1:1,000,000.

The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor  
communities are enormous, says the scientist. Literacy rates improve  
hugely, fishermen are able to mend their nets, women to weave  
clothing. During an early field trial, funded by the British  
government, in Ghana, Silver met a man called Henry Adjei-Mensah,  
whose sight had deteriorated with age, as all human sight does, and  
who had been forced to retire as a tailor because he could no longer  
see to thread the needle of his sewing machine. "So he retires. He was  
about 35. He could have worked for at least another 20 years. We put  
these specs on him, and he smiled, and threaded his needle, and sped  
up with this sewing machine. He can work now. He can see."

"The reaction is universal," says Major Kevin White, formerly of the  
US military's humanitarian programme, who organised the distribution  
of thousands of pairs around the world after discovering Silver's  
glasses on Google. "People put them on, and smile. They all say,  
'Look, I can read those tiny little letters.'"

Making and distributing a billion pairs of spectacles is no small  
task, of course - even at a dollar each (the target cost), and without  
Silver taking any profit, the cost is eye-watering.

This is what Silver calls "the challenge of scaling up".

For the Indian project he has joined forces with Mehmood Khan, a  
businessman whose family trust runs a humanitarian programme based in  
500 villages in the northern state of Haryana, from where he originates.

There will be no shortage of takers in the region, Khan says. "One  
million in one year is straightaway peanuts for me. In the districts  
where we are working, one district alone will have half a million  
people [who need the technology]." Khan's day job is as Global Leader  
of Innovation for Unilever, and though his employer will have no  
direct connection with the scheme, having contact with 150m consumers  
a day, as he points out, means he is used to dealing with large numbers.

But surely finding funding on this scale will be impossible? "I share  
a vision with Josh," says Khan. "A thing like this, once it works, you  
create awareness, you enrol governments and the UN, and the model  
becomes scaleable. People begin to believe." And from a business point  
of view, he notes wryly, when poor people become more economically  
developed they also become potential customers.

In addition to the enormous manufacturing and distribution challenges,  
Silver has one other pressing problem, namely addressing the sole  
complaint about the glasses - their rather clunky size and design.

"Work is going on on several new designs, and further work will be  
required to get the costs down. The truth is that there is, at the  
moment, no device that can be made for a dollar in volumes of 100  
million.

"But I am entirely confident that we can do that."

Such is his determination, you wouldn't bet against it. Oxford  
University, at his instigation, has agreed to host a Centre for Vision  
in the Developing World, which is about to begin working on a World  
Bank-funded project with scientists from the US, China, Hong Kong and  
South Africa. "Things are never simple. But I will solve this problem  
if I can. And I won't really let people stand in my way."


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A Zulu man wearing adaptive glasses. Photograph: Michael Lewis