Two young Kiwi eye doctors are developing AI smartphone technology they hope will save the sight of a million people by 2030.
It started in 2007 in a rural clinic in Kenya, 200 kilometres from the nearest hospital, in Mombasa. Otago medical student Hong Sheng Chiong was doing his first overseas elective, and was shocked at the lack of basic supplies.
That included equipment to look into patients’ eyes to diagnose and treat vision problems. Chiong knew people were going or remaining blind with conditions that were readily treatable in New Zealand.
All that was needed was some eye equipment – but that was mostly expensive and complicated.
Chiong, an inventor-tinkerer from childhood, put the idea in the back of his mind and went on with his medical training, including two more third world electives.
Six years later, Chiong was doing a stint in neuro-surgery, when he met another Otago trainee doctor, Ben O’Keeffe, and discovered a shared interest in eye health, particularly in developing countries. They started thinking about a lens that could turn a mobile phone - ubiquitous almost anywhere in the world - into a device which could look into, and take pictures of, the inside of your eye.
As smartphone camera technology improved, so did the possibility for retinal imaging. In 2014 Chiong and O’Keeffe got together in a Wellington hospital meeting room with a logo and a video and took the decision to form a social enterprise with the goal of “ending preventable blindness”.
Step one: create cheap, easy-to-use devices which could attach to a smartphone and help doctors diagnose eye problems.
Their first product, an open-source, 3D-printable lens, has been downloaded more than 50,000 times globally. These days, oDocs Eye Care has two main products – a retinal camera and an ophthalmoscope – used for different sorts of eye examinations. Both attach to a smartphone and are significantly cheaper than the large, high-spec machines used by ophthalmologists in big hospitals.
It’s early days, but the company has already sold 400 devices, here and overseas.
More importantly, a $150,000 grant from the Spark 5G starter fund has helped the company develop 5G-enabled, telehealth eye diagnosis technology, meaning non-specialist primary healthcare people (GPs, opticians, staff in rural clinics, school eye testers, maybe even pharmacists) could do the eye tests using their phones and send through the pictures to ophthalmologists in big hospitals or eye clinics for diagnosis.
The specialists can then make decisions about the next steps.
Trials of the free MedicMind teleophthalmology portal have already seen real-time retinal examinations carried out with a New Zealand patient and a consultant in Scotland; more practical trials are being rolled out in Sydney as well as closer to home
“In the future you could have virtual clinics with a specialist at home looking at images and ‘seeing’ patients,” O’Keeffe says.
Add in artificial intelligence and machine learning and early-stage triage could be done by the smartphone and the MedicMind technology, O’Keeffe says.
This has the potential to save a lot of time for patients, particularly in rural areas, as well as for overworked clinicians, who spend a significant amount of their time seeing people who didn't actually need an appointment but were given a referral just to be on the safe side.
“You could save 40 percent of unnecessary referrals,” O’Keeffe says; people who might spend hours getting to hospital and then spend more hours in an overflowing waiting room - all for a 10 minute consultation with a specialist who tells them everything is fine.
On the other side it could also highlight patients who need to be seen particularly urgently.
“It could be a big time and cost saving for the New Zealand health system.”
As for so many other sectors, the Covid-19 pandemic has fast-tracked adoption - or at least consideration - of remote, virtual and digital solutions to healthcare problems, O’Keeffe says.
And its focus on telehealth has also brought the company to the attention of funders.
As well as the Spark funding, oDocs is the first (and so far the only) New Zealand company to get money from the Dubai-based Expo Live Innovation Impact grant programme, a scheme designed to “fund novel and innovative solutions that make the world a better place”.
In February, Chiong told journalist Mehak Srivastava from Middle East business media organisation MEED the company had diverted US$30,000 from the US$100,000 Expo Live grant to develop the teleophthalmology platform.
“It could help eye-care practices around the world deal with fallout from the pandemic, thus strengthening their operations in the future,” he said.
ODocs also gets to take part in Expo 2020 Dubai which, delayed by the pandemic, will now run from October this year to the end of March 2022.
As well as bringing oDocs’ open source equipment onto a world stage, the expo also gives the team the chance to meet a range of innovators around the world, Chiong says. It also brings the company’s stage one mission – to save the sight of 1 million people by 2030 – closer to fruition.
Globally, around 285 million people are blind or visually impaired, suffering from a variety of conditions, 80 percent of which are preventable or treatable. Ninety percent of those cases are in developing countries.
“For a social enterprise like ours, it’s not just about showing our product on a world stage. It’s about sharing the idea and the passion behind it, in the hope of potentially inspiring millions, if not touching the lives of billions.”
Meanwhile for Chiong there’s the small issue of finishing his five-year specialist ophthalmology training. 2025 is the date at the moment. Once Chiong is done, O’Keeffe will start.
On the business side, oDocs now has 11 staff and is in early-stage discussion with the NZX and ASX about a potential dual listing in 2026, O’Keeffe says.
They are planning a US$100,000 investment round next year, and projecting to be a US$12 million company in five years,” he says.
There’s also a plan to start their own private eye care clinic with real and virtual consultations.
Doctors as corporate moguls?
“We are terrible business people,” O’Keeffe jokes. “We don’t learn about this stuff.”
