The COVID 19 pandemic triggers the need for telemedicine. The See Far project proposes a new model of specialized medical care that provides greater accessibility for everyone.
It is estimated that approximately 180 million people in the world do have diabetes and needs fundus examinations for good control and follow-up. Other diseases such as age-related macular degeneration or glaucoma are equally prevalent in society and also require fundus examinations to avoid blindness.
The different existing health care models vary in the quality of care they provide to the population, but in most of them one can find difficulties in providing access to specialized diagnosis of retinal diseases and consequently the treatments come late and become much more ineffective.
Having trouble with the access to specialty eye care and obtaining good qality eye fundus imaging, new technologies have made their way to provide improved accessibility and decrease preventable blindness.
Image- capture in Ophthalmology is used extensively for disease documentation and treatment monitoring. Usually this has relied upon expensive units operated by trained technitians in an outpatient clinic settings.
With the improvement in Smartphone optical and sensory capabilities during the last decade, using smartphones in fundus imaging is becoming a powerful clinical tool, particularly in low- resource territories where ophthalmologist are not available neither systems for teleophthalmology
Seefar Project proposes an innovative system of doctor / patient communication through smart glasses and proposes a better model of doctor / patient care in which the patient himself can self-examine his eye fundus and send the image fin order to obtain a specialized diagnosis.
Likewise, in this new kind of reelationship, the patient receives the information appropriate to his phase of the disease directly on his Smartphone.The patient receives councelling and clinical indications that empowers him/ her to be the director in his/hers medical atention.
The Seefar project also allows the compilation of images of the same patient that allows an artificial intelligence to analyze the existence of progression or not of their disease with an accuracy similar to that obtained with face-to-face visits to the ophthalmologist that are carried out today.
Writtenn by: Luis Castillon Torre, Head of the Ophthalmology Service at Hospital San Juan de Dios del Aljarafe, Seville, Spain.
