Astonishing 11 year old Leena Rafeeq invents “Ogler Eyescan” that detects eye disease

An 11-year-old girl has developed an app called “Ogler EyeScan” that can detect eye diseases and other ocular conditions.

This application is accessible on smart phones and utilises a unique scanning process. Sharing her creation on LinkedIn Leena Rafeeq detailed how her inspired invention functions. With the use of trained models to diagnose potential issues related to the eyes or vision, including such diseases as Arcus, Melanoma, Pterygium and Cataract.

Ogler Eyescan has been a year in development with Leena impressively commencing work on the project at the age of 10. Beginning by taking a deep dive into the fields relevant to bringing a tool like this to fruition. This included understanding a multitude of eye conditions, learning about the required technology involved such as computer vision, machine learning models and the algorithms required to generate and maintain them.

“The App was developed natively with SwiftUI without any third-party libraries or packages, and it took me six months of research and development to bring this innovative app to life”

This achievement is nothing short of spectacular, especially at such a young age and displays yet another phenomenal use for artificial intelligence and signals one of many ways it is coming to revolutionise innovation, in process and in creation itself. In particular, it shows one of many ways AI can be harnessed to progress medicine and its practice going into the future.

Ogler Eyescan is a great example of bringing together different aspects of all emerging technologies to make it more accessible and provide unprecedented services that have not been available before is perhaps the most potent way of developing and then utilizing all new technologies as effectively as possible.

A self-taught coder, Leena is home-schooled with her sister Hana by her parents who are based out of Dubai. Hana is equitably as accomplished, receiving recognition late last year from Apple CEO Tim Cook as the youngest Apple iOS developer. This was for an App she developed herself that tells stories to educate and entertain children.

Learning to code through their parents who are Fintech entrepreneurs, the sisters evidently have an innate ability to code. It will be interesting to see how many more inspiring innovations of this nature we will continue to see from exceptional talent given the tools and recourses necessary, regardless of any factors aside from talent and industry.