Jeune Street

Josh Silver's adaptive glasses

I love reading about innovations like the new adaptive glasses developed by Prof Josh Silver, here at Oxford:

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 plans to deliver 1 million of these glasses in India within the next year, and to a billion people by 2020. I'm sometimes suspicious of technical solutions for reducing poverty, primarily because they can appear to ignore the critical dimension of building human capacity in the process of development. But what is exciting about these adaptive glasses is that their whole aim is to unleash potential. Take this for example:

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."

Very cool. (Hat tip: Peter Tamas)