Spotlight on children’s sight as Opti Munich continues to grow

Children’s sight was on the top of the agenda at last weekend’s Opti Munich trade fair.

A packed opening conference heard about the danger of a rise of childhood myopia and the country’s newly-coined expression for children glued to smartphones and tablets – ‘smombies’.

Discussing the subject were Wolfgang Wesemann director of the Higher Technical School of Ophthalmic Optics in Cologne and specialist paediatric optician Markus Frank.

Weseman underlined the importance of children’s vision by opening the talk with the statistic that 90% of what a child learns is perceived through their eyes. He went on to tell the audience that bad vision in infants could lead to the development of mental health issues and learning difficulties and that there was a child myopia epidemic looming.