Every five seconds, someone, somewhere in
the world goes blind. Every minute, one more child goes blind – and 60% of
these children die within a year.
There are up to 45 million people already
blind across the world. Without effective intervention, this figure is set to
rise to 76 million by 2020. More than
90% are in the developing world. India suffers a worrisome 12%. Cataract, Diabetic Retina, Glaucoma, Cornea
and Refraction problems constitute 90% of blindness.
Most importantly, over 80% of this blindness is
needless and can be easily prevented or treated. In rural India, a vicious
cycle of poverty and limited resources play havoc with the lives, thus
impacting the well-being of the nation as a whole.
Another major challenge in this segment of healthcare
is identifying the population that needs treatment. Our current system needs
expensive diagnostic devices for screening, requiring separate devices for each
problem, coupled with the availability of highly skilled technicians and
ophthalmologists during screening. This increases the cost of service
substantially and hence limits scalability; this has resulted in a grossly
under serving the rural market. Only around 7-10% of people at various stages
of blindness are screened and treated as of today.
Dr Shyam Vasudeva Rao from Bangalore decided
to crack this problem and after putting 1.5 years of hard work, he and his dynamic
group of technocrats at ‘Forus Health’ designed revolutionary device ‘3nethra’ which is world first portable, intelligent, non-invasive, non-mydriatic eye
pre-screening headhunt device which is extremely cost effective and can be operated
by a minimally trained technician.
3netra can simultaneously detect 5 major and most common ailments;
Cataract, Refraction, Diabetic Retina, Glaucoma, Corneal Problems.
Dr. Shyam has a doctorate in Real Time
Embedded Systems, specialising in Parallel Computer Architecture from Indian
Institute of Science (gold Medal) & has worked for CG Smith, Ericsson &
Tata Consultancy Services and Philips. Working as a director of technology in
Philips Innovation Campus Bangalore, he established the innovation framework
for Consumer Electronics and Medical Systems division. Dr. Shyam is very
passionate about offering low cost technological solutions aimed at rural
health.
While elaborating the need for 3netra kind
of solution Dr. Shyam says “About 8 years back, we had the opportunity of
meeting Dr. G.Venkataswamy, founder of the world famous Aravind Eye Hospital,
Madurai. He helped us realise the seriousness of blindness in India and also
explained how Arvind Eye Hospital was using innovative methods to reach the
poor. The discussion was overwhelming and we were very fascinated by the kind
of service the Arvind Eye hospital was doing by almost serving 2/3rd of its
customers for free. We wanted to use our technology background to solve our
countries health problems. This made us work on the idea of needless blindness
prevention as the first step”.
Using 3nethra,
Forus Health aims to increase pre-screening efficiency for eyes related
problems in rural India. The initial version of 3netra was aimed at adult and
elderly patients but now Dr. Shyam’s team have developed a version with
in-build refractometry for screening eye defects in small children. This is
huge step forward for preventing needless blindness in young kids.
Dr. Shyam says “another major eye problem
which we are currently working on is to detect retinopathy in prematurely born
babies as the rate of blindness is extremely high if not diagnosed and treated
within 48 hours of birth. We are building a version of 3netra to address this
problem which will be available soon.”
In India, 3netra has been very effective in screening
population, outside the hospitals, in camps, Kiosks, RTO office, wedding halls,
social gathering etc. and the results were quite shocking. In a year they screened around 300 thousand
people but the alarming part was that, among those who were diabetic, 32 % of
them had diabetic retina while the world average is 20%. This has major
impact on the other organs as well and there is more than 90% correlation
between diabetic retina and diabetic nephropathy or Chronic Kidney Disease
(CKD).
If one does not know that they have CKD, and hence
cannot manage this disease, then they could soon get into end stage and the
treatment is putting them on dialysis. This looked like a much bigger problem
that eye problems. Eye care and Kidney care are two very different things, the
competencies are different, the hospitals are different, the market dynamics
are different except that both have diabetes in common. And managing
diabetes could manage DR as well as CKD.
So now Dr. Shyam and his team are working on project
called ‘RenalyX’. It works with screening CKD and those having this problem,
they will be put on a disease management and those unlucky ones who have
reached end stage renal disease (ESRD) they are put on hemo-dialysis, which can
be done in tire 2 and tire 3 towns as well as rural areas. The products and
services are just getting developed and too early to count any success.
3netra has won multiple national and
international awards for the technological innovation but what is more
heartening is that it offers solution which is aimed at masses. Dr. Shyam adds
“one of the key differentiator of Forus is that we are working on a problem
& the products we develop are only a consequence. Our aim is to see how we
can address needless blindness through technology.” Till date, Forus’ 3nethra has
been exported and installed in more than 20 countries including France.
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