This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
New Low Vision Readers address contrast, lighting issues
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
ATLANTA – LVR Technology LLC announced Thursday here at SECO the availability of its patented readers built specifically for patients with vision impairment.
Jeffrey Sonsino, OD, FAAO, LVR’s chief medical officer and inventor of the technology, described the glasses to Primary Care Optometry News as lighted prismatic readers made out of durable plastic.
"I have 169 patients currently using them, and they're working fantastically," he said.
Sonsino is the former director of the Vanderbilt Center for Sight.
The readers provide 6 hours of automatic, continuous lighting and charge similarly to a cellphone, taking 2 hours to fully recharge. They work best for those emerging into vision impairment with 20/40 to 20/100 vision in their better eye, according to Sonsino.
"This new technology overcomes the main factors that prevent individuals with low vision from reading – poor contrast and lighting and unrecognizable letters – by providing concentrated lighting, magnification and prism correction," the company said in a press release issued at SECO.
Sonsino told PCON that the technology has gotten positive feedback from patients.
"The best feedback that we get is when one of our low vision patients sits on them and they come into my office and will not leave until we fix them or replace them on the spot,” he said. “That's how I know that they're getting heavy use."
Sonsino discussed a clinical study that involved 25 participants with 20/50 vision or worse in their better seeing eye. The participants experienced vision loss due to age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, Stargardt's maculopathy, glaucoma with central loss and retinal dystrophies.
The trial compared habitual correction with the Low Vision Readers. Results showed that there was an 89.1% improvement in near visual acuity using the Sloan ETDRS near chart. Mean visual acuity with habitual correction was 2 M; with Low Vision Readers, visual acuity improved to 1.0 M- at a working distance of 18 cm, according to Sonsino.
"We were supposed to enroll 40 subjects, but stopped the trial early because we were so far statistically significant, that there was no need to continue," Sonsino told PCON. – by Chelsea Frajerman