Rehabilitation and low vision 

 

 

Group Research Team: 

Dr. Abdullah Alotaibi

Dr. Haya Alfarhan

Dr.Ferial Zuraid

Vision is an essential part of everyday life, depended on constantly by people at all ages. Vision affects development, learning, communicating, working, health, and quality of life. Globally, and according to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2002 more than 161 million people were visually impaired, of whom 124 million people had low vision and 37 million were blind. However, refractive error as a cause of visual impairment was not included, which implies that the actual global magnitude of visual impairment is greater. Visual impairment is not distributed uniformly throughout the world. More than 90% of the world's visually impaired live in developing countries, and WHO 2002 estimation for visual impairment is Saudi Arabia to be 227,611, more recent figure is coming out in the next few months in the WHO web site where they expect the figure to be higher as the criteria for visually impaired person differs from one country to another.

 

While nothing medically can be done for patients with low vision, their quality of life can be greatly improved, and with over 200,000 victims of this disabling impairment in Saudi Arabia it was surely a well deserved clinic with equipped Low Vision Aids (LVA) will improve the life of all those thousands of patients. Therefore, the aim of the research in low vision is to help people with low vision to have different options for the enhancement of residual vision including optical and non-optical devices and providing training for the low vision assistive technologies.