When I was young, I provided myself with some severe traumas.  At times, I might have even thought I had a private room at the Meadowbrook Hospital.  (This facility is now called the Nassau County Medical Center.)

One continuing problem was my eyes.  Not just vision, but eyes.  Besides the trauma I provided them, I had started out years earlier with strabismus- either cross-eyed or lazy eye- they never got a chance to discern which one.  And, after my trauma, when my eyesight fully returned (albeit with the need for optical correction- eyeglasses), I had to perform an eye exercise 20 times a day for years.

Basically, this “device” was a rectangular cardboard, 2.5 by 6 inches, with a series of blue dots on one side and red dots on the other.  (The dots were placed at 1 ¹/₈, 2 ⁷/₈, and 4 ¾ inches, with each successive dot larger than the next [⁵/₁₆, ½, ¹³/₁₆  inches in diameter, respectively.  This is not from recall- I still have the “thing”.])

I am pretty sure I overdid it.  Mostly because I knew I wanted to see.  And, it helped- big time.  I don’t have lazy eye, and my eyesight is pretty darned good.  (Amazingly, when I passed the age of 62, I was able to stop wearing contacts (or eyeglasses)- for the first time since I was 6 years old…)

And, now, there’s a tool that promises to treat presbyopia (age related vision impairment- which leads one to use reading glasses).  GlassesOff doesn’t change the eye optics- it relies on training the brain to make changes to reflect its needs for sight processing.  They also claim it works for lazy eye, as well.

This new company is based in the five-towns area of Long Island, and was cofounded by Shai Novik with Nimrod Madar serving as CEO.  (The executives of the firm are from Israel.)

Our expanded knowledge of neuroplasticity provided the impetus for this device to be developed, to make these changes in our brains. Their device uses our brain’s ability to change to augment our visual skills- primarily by improving the visual cortex image processing speed and efficiency, as well as our ability to discern shades of gray (which is termed the detection threshold).

This device is an app that works on our smartphones- Android or Apple.  (However, the Android application only works for a single user registration; the Apple version affords multiple users the ability to improve vision with the same app.  That should change, as the Android app is improved.)

The program consists of three 12 minute programs a week over about 3 months duration (with a maintenance program to keep up the changed results).  In other words, vision improvement is effected with some 10 to 15 hours of exercise.  (Not much different than my “Edmonds Optical, Inc” cardboard “thingie”.

That is a key consideration, too.  You can’t speed up this program. It takes three months because our brains need time to assimilate this learning we are providing.  It is also why it’s only one program and requires we take a day off between sessions.

Here’s looking at you, kid…

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