Shujaat Ali Qadri

Age is just a number for precocious children. It surely is when one meets the 11-year-old Leena Rafeeq, of Kerala, who has developed a mobile application that uses artificial intelligence to detect eye diseases and other conditions with an iPhone.

Leena has named the application 'Ogler EyeScan'. She created it at the age of 10. Now a year after the invention of the AI app, Leena has submitted it to the App Store, from where iOS users can access it.

Recently Leena shared his latest achievement on LinkedIn.

Leena took to LinkedIn to offer information on how this device works and also demonstrated it through a video.

Many users were left extremely impressed with her innovation and congratulated her on achieving this feat at such a young age. 

"Good example of how we can reduce / curtail equity in health using AI. Great work," said a user.

"You deserve a huge congrats Leena. Such an awesome job at the age of 10.," said another person.

A third person said, "Wow, that's amazing! You have accomplished so much with your creation of Ogler EyeScan and I wish you the best of luck and some amazing appstore reviews."

Replying to a user, Rafeeq said that the model accuracy is "almost 70 per cent". She said, "However, I am encountering difficulties with the presence of glare and burst from lights, caused by the distance required for capturing scans through the phone device. To address this, we have implemented metrics and detection for light-related issues, which prompt users to conduct a re-scan. I am currently focused on training more sophisticated models, and once Ogler is accepted by the Appstore, we will release an update."

An image grabbed from Leena's video explaining the use of ther app

Leena said the application can use "advanced computer vision and machine learning" algorithms to analyze a variety of parameters such as light and color intensity, distance, and look-up points to locate eyes within the Oglar frame range.

It identifies problems with bursts of light and whether the eyes are positioned exactly inside the scanner frame. Once the quality of the scan is confirmed, the app identifies possible eye diseases or conditions such as Arcos, Melanoma, Pterygium, and Cataracts.

It uses trained models to diagnose these conditions.

“This app was developed natively with SwiftUI without any third-party libraries or packages, and it took me six months of research and development to bring this innovative app to life,” the young girl said.

For this, Leena said, she learned a lot about different eye conditions, computer vision, algorithms, machine learning models, and advanced levels of Apple iOS development, including sensor data, AR, CreateML, CoreML, and more.

At the age of just six, Leena created a website from scratch for her school's science exhibition.

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However, it is worth noting that Ogler EyeScan is only for iPhone 10 and above which includes sensor data, AR, CreateML, CoreML, and more. However, it is to be noted that Ogler EyeScan only supports iOS 16+ on iPhone 10 and above.