COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK NOTICE

This application includes material which is subject or may be subject to copyright and/or trademark protection. The copyright and trademark owner(s) has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by any of the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright and trademark rights whatsoever. Such trademarks may include “EyeQue”, “PVT” “Personal Vision Tracker”, “Insight”, “VisionCheck” and others.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Vision is arguably the most important of the senses. The human eye and its direct connection to the human brain is an extremely advanced optical system. Light from the environment goes through the eye optical train comprised of the cornea, the pupil, and the lens and focuses to create an image on the retina. As all optical systems, light propagation through the eye optics is subject to aberrations. The most common forms of aberrations in the eye are defocus and astigmatism. These low order aberrations are the cause of the most common refractive eye conditions myopia (nearsightedness) and hyperopia (farsightedness). Higher order aberrations are also present and can be described most conveniently by the Zernike polynomials. These usually have a lower effect on visual function. The eye, like any other organ in the human body, may suffer from various diseases and disorders, the most prominent today are: cataract, AMD, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, dry eye. Other conditions exist and should also be considered in the scope of this application.

Ophthalmic measurements are critical for eye health and proper vision. Those ophthalmic measurements could be sectioned into objective and subjective types. Objective types measurements give a metric of a physiological, physical (e.g. mechanical or optical), biological or functional without the need for input from the measured individual (patient, subject, user or consumer). Examples of objective tests include but are not limited to OCT (optical coherent tomography used to image a 3 dimensional and cross sections of the eye), scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO, used for spectral imaging of the retina), fundus image (used to present an image of the retina), auto-refractor (used for refraction measurement), keratometer (used for providing a profile of the cornea), tonometer (used to measure the IOP—intra ocular pressure). Subjective measurements give a metric with relation to the individual input. That is, they provide parameters that also take into consideration the brain functions, perception and cognitive abilities of the individual. Examples of subjective tests include but are not limited to visual acuity test, contrast sensitivity test, phoropter refraction test, color vision test, visual field test, and the EyeQue PVT and Insight.

Today, both objective and subjective eye exams (measurements) are done by an ophthalmologist or an optometrist. The process usually involves the patient needing to schedule an appointment, wait for the appointment, travel to the appointment location (e.g. office or clinic), wait in line, perform multiple tests using various tools and potentially moving between different technicians and different eye doctors. The prolonged wait times both for the appointment as well as in line at the appointment location, along with the hassle of performing the tests with different professionals and the duration of those tests might seem daunting to many patients. Furthermore, the shear effort associated with the process and even the requirement of remembering to start the process to begin with might deter patients from going through with it.

Moreover, currently about 2.5 billion people do not have access to eye and vision care at all. The cost of eye exams could be considered quite significant especially in some places in the world. This poses a hindrance to the availability of eye care in third world countries for example. The cost, time consumption and perceived hassle also makes it at times prohibitive to have repeated eye exams, especially at the desired frequency. Those might be necessary in special cases (for example after refractive surgery or cataract surgery where repeated measurements should be performed to track the progress of the patient's status over time and the success of the surgery. Additionally, even under normal circumstances, measurements at a doctor's office only represent a single point in time. The situation under which the measurements were made might not be optimal or do not fully represent the patient's characteristics. The patient might have been tired, stressed or agitated (a doctor's visit might be quite stressful in and of itself but could also being run from test to test and being posed with questions and options elevate the patient's level of stress) or was just in a bad mood. Even the state of mind of the doctor themselves might influence the way the measurement is performed. Beyond all that, the time of day and other environmental conditions (whether direct e.g. lighting conditions or indirect e.g. temperature) could also affect the measurement and provide incomplete or false information.

The availability of information (including specifically medical information) on the internet, the increased awareness of people for preventive medicine, and the emergence of tele-medicine leads to many taking control of their own health. Devices for screening, monitoring and tracking medical conditions are quite pervasive in today's world, for example blood pressure measurement devices, and blood sugar monitors. The technological advancements allow for people to be more independent in diagnosis, prevention and tracking of various health conditions. Furthermore, many prefer to perform these activities in the comfort of their homes without the need for appointments or other time-consuming activities. In case of an anomaly, they would call or email their physicians to consult for the appropriate course of action.

The advancement of technologies effectively makes computers with screens and cameras ubiquitous in the form of laptops, tablets and smartphones. Therefore, enabling many people to have a device already capable of computing displaying and recording information.

All this brings the need for a series of devices that will enable users to perform ophthalmic measurements at home, by themselves, in a timely and cost-effective manner. It should be clear that the quality of these measurements and their accuracy and precision should meet or exceed the standards of today's measurement methods.

This vision could be further enhanced by use of cloud-based data and analytics that enables complete access to the entire history of a patient exams, tests and measurements. Moreover, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) will enable diagnosis based on machine learning and big data. This could be done by means of data mining, neural network decision making and pattern detection and recognition, as some examples of the AI capabilities.

To summarize, the vision for eye care in the not so far future will look like: A complete solution for eye and vision care for consumers and doctors; Remote, self-administered battery of tests for both disease and functional; measurements are enabled by technology and devices, AI is used for analysis, tracking and reporting. Enhanced by big data correlations and insights.

In simple terms, as an example: A person sits on their couch at the comfort of their home, uses a device to do various measurements, that data is uploaded to an AI for analysis. The AI will let the person know the results and notify the doctor. The AI will initiate alerts for the person and doctor in necessary cases. The person will not need to get up unless a serious issue occurs (i.e. surgery). All other issues will be dealt with remotely (e.g. email/phone/video conference with the doctor, order glasses and have them delivered to the home, direct delivery of doctor prescribed medications).

Despite the apparent approach of “direct to consumer”, the methodologies could easily be implemented for a more enterprise like model. One example of such implementation will have a hierarchical structure in which an entity such as a hospital, association, or a medical insurance company provides the ability for the doctors to provide their patients with such devices and capabilities. The devices are all connected through the user accounts to the cloud and the measurements are streamed directly into the users' accounts (and potentially their medical records). Those accounts could be attached to one or more doctors and can also be transferred and shared.

(1) Field of the Invention

The invention generally relates to vision testing and refraction measurement systems that attach to a display for example the PVT system, the VisionCheck system and the Insight systems by EyeQue. More particularly, the invention relates to means and methods of measuring characteristics of the display and correcting for optical aberrations in the abovementioned systems. Any system intended for measurement of vision and ocular characteristics (e.g. refraction), where the system includes a display, an optical system comprised of refractive elements and/or reflective elements (e.g. lenses and/or mirrors) may suffer from two main problems: the characteristics of the display may not be known (e.g. where the display may be part of a smartphone and the phone resolution is not well reported), and the optical system creates aberrations for the displayed image. The proposed invention describes methods and apparatuses for overcoming these problems.

(2) Description of the Related Art

The known related art fails to anticipate or disclose the principles of the present invention.

In the related art, minimization of the FoV and more particularly in the PVT system the images size, allows a way to overcome the distortion aberration in the system that causes the presented image to form bent lines to the user while having straight lines on the display. The VisionCheck system incorporates an aspheric lens to overcome the distortion of the lines presented to the user. This type of hardware solution makes the system more complicated and expensive.

The display property of PPI is crucial in the determination of the presented image size. Scaling needs to be done between different displays to allow for correct representation of the images. The current systems rely on the input from the phone firmware to indicate the correct resolution in the form of the PPI (pixels per inch). Some phones today do not report that value correctly. It is therefore necessary for these phone displays to manually input the correct PPI in the backend of the software.

Thus, there is a long felt need in the art for the present invention.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention overcomes shortfalls in the related art by presenting an unobvious and unique combination and configuration of methods and components to correct for optical aberrations in the system and to allow a self-calibration method to measure the display resolution.

The invention overcomes shortfalls in the related art by using calibration processes to measure the display resolution and create a correction mapping of the distortion aberration.

In an embodiment of the invention the display is part of a smartphone. The user is presented with a rectangle of the right aspect ratio as the attached device. The attached device dimensions are well known. The user then adjusts and aligns the rectangle on the screen to match the attachment outline of the device. The known size of the device and the input rectangle size in pixels can then be used to calculate the phone resolution or more specifically its PPI (Pixels Per Inch). This could then be used for alignment and scaling of images on the display. In turn, this could be used for performing vision and refraction measurements.

In another embodiment of the invention the resolution measurement is based on the use of external sensor input. An example of the embodiment could be implemented using a smartphone as the display device. The attached system could then have touch points of known and defined distance. When the attached system is physically attached to the phone, the touch points indicate the pixel location of those touch points which in turn may be used in conjunction with the known distance between the points to calculate the display resolution and PPI.

In another embodiment of the invention, an optical system is attached to a display. The display presents images to the user. These images can be used for vision tests or as means to measure an optical system refraction. As an example, the optical system could be a user's eye and the refraction measurement could be the eye's required refractive correction. The optical system introduces aberrations to the user, specifically distortion aberration. This causes the image to look unclear and malformed. A method is presented in the invention to resolve the image distortion by means of pre-distortion of the image on the display. An image is pre-distorted with a distortion that is opposite that is introduced by the optical system so that, if observed on the display directly will look deformed and while looking through the optical system with its inherent distortion will cause the image to look sharp and without misshape. The main principle of the pre-distortion is a spatially dependent image curvature calibrated based on the original system distortion map.

These and other objects and advantages will be made apparent when considering the following detailed specification when taken in conjunction with the drawings.

