Late Advances in the Field of Low-Vision Telescopes and Distance Magnifiers: A Review.

Purpose: Telescopes have drastically changed the way of low vision care and improved the living of visually impaired. But, we think low vision telescope has not reached its full potential in health care mainly due to a lack of knowledge on newer technologies and lack of translation. Although telescopes are well known among the practicing community, a proper work for compiling the newer telescopic technologies and advances into a single paper has not been done yet. Methods: We have compiled all the late advances observed in the field of telescopic technologies and magnifier from the period 1984 to 2017 from a collection of 37 articles. We obtained literature materials mainly from five broad sources 1. journal article databases (24 articles), 2. online journals (6 articles), 3. publication archives of eye care association (2 articles), 4. online archives for eye health products and websites (3 Articles) and 5. offline materials such as books (1 book). Result: We found that telescopes have a significant effect on people’s lives suffering from low vision. There are a couple of technologies and ideas which can be translated into new telescopic products. We also found a trend in research trying to miniaturize existing telescopic technologies and experiment with augmented reality. Conclusion: There is a long way before the main hurdles of cosmetic appeal, cost efficiency and availability are overcome. Some solutions are visual multiplexing, automated focusing techniques, ergonomic designs, miniaturized telescopes, development of better and stable materials.