“Eye Skills, You Skills, We all got Skills for …”
Basic questions remain unanswered about what Lazy Eye really is, and how able different people are to overcome or moderate its effects.
It is our mission to empower the Lazy Eye community to collectively contribute to answering these questions.
For the last years this project has been funded privately, and with the support of the prototypefund.de. We have done this because my wife and I decided it mattered, and we could help make a difference. It has now outgrown us, and our resources. It now needs the right structure which will lead to permanent, ongoing efforts to improve and develop the system.
I believe it is necessary to consider four different groups of people in order to create a self-sustaining eco-system which can accelerate research and best-practice treatment. Here are some of the objectives I believe EyeSkills should strive to reach:
First, we the community, must take on the role of basic experimenters and hypothesis generators. This is why there is a community app for individual exploration and experimentation. An derivative version for community trials/multi-person experiments can be developed from this.
Secondly, we must turn these hypothesise into potential research projects for scientists. It must be simple for researchers to build exactly the experimental environments they need to conduct repeatable open-science. This is why the framework is abstracted out.
Thirdly, we must make best-practice available at affordable levels around the world, which in turns feeds back into cohorts for high-quality science. This will require social entrepreneurship and investment to set up distribution structures.
Finally, armed with hard evidence and professional commercial support, we must shift the treatment paradigm by helping Ophthalmologists move from just treating eyeballs to helping patients train their own visual system – without adding to their already overburdened daily regimes.
I hope you will join us in working to provide a viable alternative paradigm for understanding and working with Lazy Eye.
