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.
Optician Markus Frank, who owns a specialist children’s optometric practice, was also concerned about the increase of child myopia and was particularly worried about the children adapting to close vision at an early age. He told the audience that practitioners looking to specialise in children’s vision needed to pay special attention to the environment in the practice so children felt at ease.
Attendance figures for the show increased by 8%, to just over 27,500 from 81 different countries, said organisers GHM. For the first time, there were more international visitors than German nationals (52%: 48%).
Opti Munich 2017: January 28-30