This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Smartphone app tracks myopia progression, control methods
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Thomas Aller, OD,
announced the release of Myappia, a smartphone app for the myopia control field.Available on the Google Play Store, Myappia is intended primarily for optometrists, ophthalmologists and pediatricians to help them identify patients at risk for myopia, explain those risks and demonstrate the predicted effects of slowing their myopia progression using different methods with various expected levels of myopia control.
Aller has researched the use of bifocal and multifocal contact lenses for treating progressive myopia in children for more than 25 years.
Myappia allows the user to input the patient’s level of myopia at a particular age. The app projects how that myopia might change over the next 10 years using a progression curve adapted from published data for a fast progressing population.
In future versions, the user may adjust this progression curve to reflect their expectations about their patient, by slowing the expected progression or accelerating it, according to Aller in the release.
The user is presented with various treatments known to slow myopia progression: progressive-addition spectacle lenses, bifocal spectacles, multifocal contact lenses, orthokeratology, custom anti-myopia contact lenses and atropine. The expected levels of myopia control are presented for each treatment from the available literature, and the user may input their expected levels of control.
Once the doctor has selected age, refractive error, treatment options and expected myopia control effects, Myappia then displays, year-by-year for 10 years, the projected levels of myopia with standard treatments and with various myopia control treatments.
“By graphically demonstrating the impacts of continued myopia progression, the reductions in progression with various treatments can be easily seen and appreciated by patients and parents,” Aller said in the release.
He noted that no myopia control treatments are approved by the FDA and, as such, they are all considered to be off-label.