Cutting-edge glasses for short-sighted children under project from Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- Project provides screening and patented, award-winning lens technology for poor children
- It is a boost for city’s poorer families, who could struggle with the high cost of specialised specs
Ten-year-old schoolgirl Huang Ho-yan’s mother felt hopeless when she found out a pair of corrective glasses for her daughter’s short-sightedness would set her back nearly HK$4,000 (US$511), when the family of four lives on her husband’s monthly salary of some HK$10,000.
The housewife, who wished to be known only as Mrs Huang, said she could not sleep when Ho-yan’s myopia was found to have worsened to 350 degrees in April, from 150 degrees two years ago.
“I could see the blackboard clearly without wearing glasses from my seat on the front row two years ago, but this year I couldn’t read anything on the board from the last row, even with my glasses on,” Ho-yan says.
“It worsened so fast,” Mrs Huang says. “I kept looking for solutions online at night and learned that some special lenses can help slow it down.
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“But when I called the optical shops, they quoted HK$3,000 for the lenses and HK$500 to HK$600 for the frame.”
Exacerbating the expense, the lenses would have to be replaced whenever Ho-yan’s myopia deepened by more than 30 degrees.
“It means we may have to spend another HK$3,000 every few months,” Mrs Huang says with a frown.
And Ho-yan is not the only one.
The primary school pupil, newly into fifth grade, says more than half of the 33 students in her class wear glasses. Across the city, more than 20 per cent of over 255,000 primary pupils failed the visual acuity test at the government’s student health service centres in 2014/15, and more than 30 per cent already wore glasses when they took the test.
Vincent Ng Wing-shun, president of the Hong Kong Society of Professional Optometrists, says a range of corrective glasses for myopia are on the market, none of them cheap.
“We are talking about HK$2,000 to HK$4,000 a pair depending on types and functions,” Ng says. “And that’s not a one-off payment, as the children will have to change glasses as the conditions of their eyes develop.”
Subsidies from the government are rather limited in comparison with the market price of the special lenses.
Under the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance scheme, a special grant up to a maximum of HK$500 within 24 months will be made to cover the cost of glasses for children in need, a Social Welfare Department spokeswoman said.
“A higher grant may be made under exceptional circumstances … such as a visual problem as certified by eye doctors or optometrists,” she added, without specifying the range.
A surprising turn came for the Huangs when an officer familiar with them at the New Home Association, a pro-establishment NGO that helps new immigrants and people from ethnic minorities, said Ho-yan might be eligible for a programme offering free myopia-control spectacles.
The PolyU-HKIF Children Eye Care Project is jointly operated by the school of optometry at Polytechnic University and the Hong Kong Innovation Foundation.
Kicking off on August 31, the programme pledged to provide regular visual screening and free patented glasses for 200 children from poor families over two years.
Eligible children must come from low-income families in Sham Shui Po or Kwun Tong, and have short-sightedness of 300 degrees or above.
The sponsored glasses will use the Defocus Incorporated Multiple Segments (DIMS) lens, which were invented by optometrists at PolyU and pocketed three top awards at the 46th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva in Switzerland last year.
A two-year randomised clinical trial of DIMS by the PolyU inventors and published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology showed that, in the 160 children who completed the study, myopia progressed on average 59 per cent less than would have been expected without the glasses. More than 20 per cent did not show any progression at all.
Ho-yan, whose family moved into a public housing estate in Kwun Tong from Sham Shui Po a few months ago, fit the criteria just right and got her DIMS lenses, in a sky-blue frame, two days before school resumed.
“It’s been about two weeks and I am just getting used to my new glasses,” she says, playing on a swing at a Sham Shui Po park after school.
“I must make sure that the central parts of the lenses are right in front of my eyes to get the best vision,” she says. “From certain angles, I can see something like honeycomb on the lenses.”
I have no idea what to do when the sponsorship expires. We will just have to cope with what’s going to happen and what we can afford
The “honeycomb” are mini lenses with a diameter of 0.8 micrometres, or eight 10,000ths of a centimetre, which cover the whole of the lens except for a 9mm circle in the centre.
When a user looks through the central area that suits their degree of myopia, they will have clear vision. Meanwhile the mini lenses will pull other images in front of the retina, instead of leaving them at the back like normal lenses.
“It’s like tricking the eyes to stop chasing the images projected at its back and growing thicker,” Ng of the optometrists society explains.
“When the growth of thickness slows down, deepening of myopia slows down as well.”
The eye care project promised to provide visual screening for enrolled children like Ho-yan every six months, but the patients might have to find alternative treatment under ophthalmologists’ advice if their myopia control with DIMS turns out to be unsatisfactory.
“I have no idea what to do when the sponsorship expires,” Mrs Huang says. “We will just have to cope with what’s going to happen and what we can afford.”
Ho-yan worries as she will become a secondary student, burdened with more academic tasks, in two years. But the energetic and talkative young girl says she cannot stop watching her favourite YouTuber on a daily basis.
Asked what she wants to do most if she can get rid of glasses one day, Ho-yan says without thinking: “Swimming.”
She continues: “Now without my glasses, I can’t watch the big clock above the pool and can’t tell how long I swam.”
