BME.01 Ocular Bulbar Redness Measuring Device

• Andres Campos
• Alec Cote
• Jacqueline Escutia
• Ryan Park
• Rishabh Thankan

Ocular bulbar redness is caused by the reddening of the conjunctiva of the eye due to any underlying ocular disease that causes eye inflammation and vasodilation of the conjunctival vessels. Ocular redness, therefore, can be measured to track the progression of ocular diseases, which is important given that some ocular diseases can even be sight-threatening. However, ophthalmologists lack reliable, accurate methods of measuring ocular redness, as current solutions are either prone to bias, inconvenient to use, or downright inaccurate. Therefore, ophthalmologists need a device for measuring relative bulbar redness as a proxy of inflammation. Our objective, therefore, was to design a portable, non-imaging, optical detection device for the objectively accurate, quantified measurement of relative redness in the eye. Based on this objective, a trichromatic colorimeter design was chosen and developed into a functional prototype. Development involved CAD modeling a device in SolidWorks, 3D printing all the modeled parts with PLA, designing, and soldering the Arduino and photodiode circuitry to achieve basic functionality of measuring light intensity, coding the Arduino to calculate a redness score, and assembling the optical setup to be able to focus reflected light onto a photodiode in the circuit. To determine the functionality of device, verification testing was performed to test one of our quantified requirements: the correlation between our device’s redness scores and redness percentage should have an R-square value of at least 0.9. Results of the test indicate that the correlation between our device’s redness scores, and redness percentage has an R-square value of 0.9919, indicating that our device “passes” the test and meets the requirement.