Design of a Mobile Application for Eye Signs Screening

Mestrado em Engenharia Computação e Instrumentação Médica

Advances in technology make mobile phones very attractive to everyone, specially smartphones, with a large number of applications, being the medical ones a growing market. In the field of ophthalmology, some diseases or other health problems are being detected very frequently just by looking to a photograph, specially in social networks. This fact encouraged us to create a mobile application that may detect some eye pathologies and that could be used almost by everybody, even in low income countries. In this master thesis the necessary features of a mobile application for eye signs screening are described, portraying some ocular pathologies (amblyopia and retinoblastoma e.g.) that can be detected with a photograph using solely a smartphone with ash. Also the data collection protocol necessary to obtain this data and later process it with the use of algorithms are depicted. A beta version of the developed application is presented, with the set of instructions to the user. This application, to apply the defined protocol, was designed keeping in mind the target user, the parents, who can use it at home as a tool to trace the visual health of their children, given that an ophthalmologist follow-up is scarce or nonexistent in many places. Finally, some results of a Hospital field study are portrayed with complementary medical opinions about the application and also about the protocol designed, which is assessed as a necessary complement to an early diagnosis for important diseases like amblyopia or strabismus that have large incidence in children.