An 11-year-old Malayali girl based in Dubai has created an artificial intelligence-based application that she says can detect various eye diseases and conditions. Leena Rafeeq used an iPhone to create the app, called ‘Ogler EyeScan,’ which uses a scanning process. She announced her creation on LinkedIn, saying she developed the app when she was just 10 years old.
Leena Rafeeq shared that the Ogler EyeScan app is currently under review in Apple’s app store and expressed her hope that it will be approved soon.
Leena Rafeeq shared a video on LinkedIn that demonstrated how her app, Ogler EyeScan, works. The video showed the app identifying various eye conditions such as Arcus, Melanoma, Pterygium, and Cataract with the help of trained models. According to Leena, the app can analyze parameters like light and color intensity, distance, and look-up points to locate the eyes within the frame range, by utilizing advanced computer vision and machine learning algorithms. It also detects any light burst issues and ensures that the eyes are positioned correctly inside the scanner frame.
Revealing more details about her innovation, Leena said that it was created natively with SwiftUI without any third-party libraries or packages after six months of research and development.
In the process of development, the self-taught coder said that she gained more knowledge about ‘eye conditions, computer vision, algorithms, machine learning models, and advanced levels of Apple iOS development, including sensors data, AR, CreateML, CoreML’. The app is currently only supported in iPhone 10 and above with iOS 16+.
Netizens took to the comment section to laud Leena for her achievement at such a young age. One user noted that it is a great example of reducing equity health using AI. To users who enquired about the app’s accuracy, Leena said that it is nearly 70 per cent at the moment. She, however, shared the difficulties faced with ‘glare and burst from lights caused by the distance required for capturing scans’. To resolve this problem, metrics and detection for light-related issues are being deployed to enable users to retake the scan. She also revealed an update will be announced after the app store accepts the Ogler EyeScan.
Leena’s younger sister Hana had earlier gone viral for becoming the youngest iOS app developer at age 9 by developing a storytelling app. The feat even caught the attention of Apple CEO Tim Cook.
