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Presbyopia surgeons rejoice at Apple Watch announcement
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How cool is this? A watch that allows you to send and receive SMS messages, view photos and process emails? After Apple’s announcement, tapping on the screen of a smartphone just became “so last week.” Now you can do all this on your wrist on a 1-inch retina display with more pixels than your actual retina.
You can read that screen, can’t you?
You can’t? Geez, it would completely ruin the “geek chic” look of your Apple Watch if you had to pull out your reading glasses from Dollar General to see the screen, wouldn’t it?
Thankfully, there’s an app for this, too. The eye care industry has come up with a whole array of devices and drugs to help you fit in with the myopic college kids who will soon use their student loan money to buy Apple Watches.
Let’s start with presbyopic inlays, made from scratch for emmetropic presbyopes and implanted in one eye, giving J1 near with either small aperture or multifocal optics. Clinical trials of these soon-to-be-approved devices show that, on average, 95% of patients are highly satisfied with their reading performance. (Of course, that was measured in the “old days” before micro-font watches were invented.)
We have a growing number of drugs designed to reverse presbyopia by inhibiting disulfide bond formation in the crystalline lens, drugs and devices that either strengthen or give mechanical advantage to the ciliary body, and a variety of other early-stage technologies that promise to return our accommodative function to juvenile amplitudes.
And last, of course, are the pseudophakic presbyopia-correcting implants, both multifocal and accommodating, both approved and developing, that will faithfully serve our growing cataract population.
As an alternative, you could wear progressive lenses, monovision contacts or readers, but because you have a smartphone and a smartwatch, wouldn’t you want “smartvision” too?
On behalf of presbyopia-correcting surgeons everywhere, thank you, Apple, for being our business development department.
Disclosure: Hovanesian is a shareholder in Apple Inc. and owns an iPhone when he can get it away from his kids. He also consults with a number of health care companies that make presbyopia-correcting devices, which is helpful because he, too, is presbyopic.