Project Description:

Eight million people worldwide wear ocular prosthetics as a result of losing one of their eyes to physical trauma, eye cancers, or other conditions. Ocular prosthetics are hyper realistic shells that are similar to a large contact lens, they sit on top of a silicon implant that is placed in the eye during eye removal surgery and make it look like users have two healthy matching eyes.

There are only 164 ocularists in the US who can make these, and the process is non-standardized and taught through apprenticeship. Since there are so few ocularists it can be difficult for patients to reach a practice where they can be fitted for their ocular prosthetics especially for users located further from large cities, travel time from patient’s homes to ocularist office takes an average of two hours. Once patients have reached an ocularist practice the process of being fitted for an ocular prosthetic takes 8 hours of patient interactivity that some ocularist practices prefer to do in one long day while other practices prefer to split that time up over the course of 2-3 days. During user interviews we noticed the greatest complaint of patients was that the fitting process was long and uncomfortable.

Our prototype is a noninvasive imaging modality that creates a 3D model of the orbital surface, effectively removing the need for the invasive alginate molding process. We used a combination of structured light scanning and 3D reconstruction of 2D images using photogrammetry to create a 3D model of the orbital surface that can be used to create the rest of the ocular prosthetic. Our device is advantageous to users because it can be used in ophthalmologist’s offices, allowing patients to begin the fitting process earlier by providing a more accessible solution.