Dr Rajesh Mehta, former Dean of Sola Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, along with his engineer son Purna Mehta, has developed a machine capable of determining whether a person suffers from night blindness at a nominal cost.
Dr Mehta said that after 27 years of research, he has created a machine that can diagnose night blindness for the first time without going a blood test and has also applied for a patent. The idea of making this machine came to him in 1987. In 1987, Dr Mehta was returning from a medical camp in a village at night. Then he saw that the people of the village were walking fast in front of him since they could not see properly in the darkness and have night blindness or vitamin A deficiency.
With this idea, he developed a device to know whether a person is blind or not. Usually an eye doctor examines a person's eyes in a darkened room for dark adaptation. So he built a simple machine in 1989 to diagnose blindness. In it, the light from the slide was dimming. Then he made an electric machine that dimmed the light with volume control.
The history behind developing this machine is also interesting. He went to a conference in Wardha, Maharashtra, with the aim of creating awareness of the machine that he had developed. While he was returning to Ahmedabad by train with this machine, the police suspected it to be a bomb and broke it. However, Dr Mehta did not give up and continued to experiment with making the machine.
After that he made a machine that costs Rs 5,000. Subsequently, his son Purna Mehta developed a solar-powered vitamin A deficiency detection machine in 2009 which was manually operated which he later converted into an automatic one.
This machine indirectly diagnoses vitamin A deficiency. The main advantage of this machine is that this machine does not require blood sample for the test. While the blood test for this purpose will cost between Rs 1,500 and 2,000 in labs, this machine can perform the task at a cost of Rs 50 to 200.
