Technology: Near at home

Earlier in the year, Professor David Thomson wrote a two-part CET series looking at the evolution of acuity testing and charts. In the second of these (see Optician 10.09.21), he mentioned the Vision Toolbox from his company Thomson Software Solutions.

In recent years, I have been taking my laptop around with me on domiciliary visits and find the Test Chart 2020 electronic acuity charts more reliable and adaptable than hand-held charts. Increasingly for near vision assessment, I had starting replacing near cards with my tablet and running apps such as the Kindle app to assess near function. The variation of font size, design and the ability to change the viewing contrast colours are helpful, but I have always worried about the accuracy of target size interpretation. So, recently, I finally got round to trying out Thomson’s Toolbox.