Smart Technologies to Build Healthcare Models for Vision Impairment

Healthcare Sector

Healthcare sector provide services like medical aid, creation and installation of medical equipments, medicines, life insurance, health policies, and aid to day to day operations of hospital management. India’s one of biggest sector is healthcare in terms of income generation and job opportunities. Services provided by healthcare organization includes: hospital management, healthcare equipments, clinical tests, outsourcing, telemedicine, health tourism, e-health, and health insurance. Quality of Indian health services are upgrading day by day due to the usage of advanced medical informatics, tools, e-services. Healthcare wraps the advanced mechanism for disease diagnosis, treatment options, disease prevention, visual and other kind of impairments (Briggs & Gray, 1999). Also, healthcare sector generates massive amount of medical data including electronic health records, medical tests findings, and management reports (McLaughlin & Fitzgerald, 2001). Medical data is further utilized for detailed analysis for effective decision making. Data mining is the most widely used technique for extracting valuable information from medical data. Data mining is basically used for assisting doctors in diagnosis, treatment options, drug suggestion. Machine learning is another field which is widely used to provide effective healthcare services. Machine learning possess great potential for health science for using medical data and analyze it to find out inefficiencies and adopt best practices that enhance overall quality, care and reduce cost. Computer Vision also made substantial progress in health science. It plays vital role for creating applications for impaired patients.

Vision Impairment

Vision Impairment (VI) is the consequence of a functional loss of vision rather than the eye disorder itself. It is not necessary therefore, to define VI in terms of the catalogue of permanent conditions or chronic diseases that result in a loss of vision (Wickramasinghe, 2010; Espique, 2010). However, the impact may be described through 3 terms:

• •

  Low Vision: A person can see, but not well, and full vision cannot be enabled by surgery

• •

  Legally Blind: Someone lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors so that they can’t see well or have minimal vision e.g. they can’t see at 6 meters what others can see at 60 m

• •

  Totally Blind: Someone who cannot see at all (less than 20/200 vision in their better eye), and who must therefore depend on their other senses

Assistive Technologies in Healthcare

Imagine talking to an app instead of seeing your doctor when in pain or ache. Post listening to your description (symptoms), the app retrieves the most modern research it might require to examine about how to diagnose and treat your disease/problem. Lastly, a computer server examining your medical records and family history, comparing it with the finest and most current study to advise a healing procedure to your doctor that is precisely personalized to your requirements. AI in healthcare and medicine for visually impaired people can organize patient paths and curing plans better providing doctors with literally all the data they require to make a worthy choice. This consummates for the requirement for Assistive Technology (AI).