11-year-old girl makes app to detect various eye diseases

An 11-year-old Dubai-based Indian-origin girl has developed an artificial intelligence based application that she claims can detect various eye diseases and conditions.

Leena Rafeeq took to LinkedIn to announce her unique creation that uses a scanning process via an iPhone. Named “Ogler EyeScan”, the app was developed when Leena was 10 years old, according to local media.

She shared that the app is currently under review in Apple’s app store and is hopeful that it’ll be approved soon.

Posting a video that demonstrated the working of her app, it showed the Ogler EyeScan identifying conditions likeArcus, Melanoma, Pterygium, and Cataract with the help of trained models.

Leena claimed that the app can ‘analyse parameters like light and color intensity, distance, and look-up points to locate the eyes within the frame range’ by utilising advanced computer vision, and machine learning algorithms. It also identifies any light burst issues and if the eyes are positioned exactly inside the scanner frame, she added.

Revealing more details about her innovation, Leena said that it was created natively with SwiftUI without any third-party libraries or packages after six months of research and development.

In the process of development, the self-taught coder said that she gained more knowledge about ‘eye conditions, computer vision, algorithms, machine learning models, and advanced levels of Apple iOS development, including sensors data, AR, CreateML, CoreML’. The app is currently only supported in iPhone 10 and above with iOS 16+