JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says nearly 12 million Americans suffer from some form of vision impairment.
A Florida company has developed a new device, billed as the future of vision and eye care, that identifies early signs of vision loss, specifically glaucoma.
A Miami based company called Heru developed a VR-like headset that is designed to give doctors the ability to give specific vision tests easily and anywhere. To put that claim to the test, First Coast News reporter Rich Donnelly joined Heru Senior Director of Sales David Logan in Riverfront Plaza to test the device.
"In Florida, we have a lot of nursing homes," says Logan. "This gives them the same level of care a patient would have to go to a doctor's office to get."
The Heru VR headset is considerably smaller than traditional eye doctor office equipment and can even be transported in a small briefcase.
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Here's how it works; after putting on the headset, dots of light appear in random parts of the screen in front of the patient's eyes. The patient then clicks a button on a trigger when they see the dot.
Reactions are recorded on a computer.
"It measures the patient's peripheral vision and how much they have left and gives the doctor the ability to do progression analysis visit to visit," says Logan.
"The patient sees the basic same type of test stimuli that they would see in the older traditional devices," adds Logan. "And the reports were designed to emulate existing industry standard test results.
The Heru VR headset device was released in October and is available in almost every state in the country.