69729Leveraging home-monitoring vision tech for urgent tele-ophthalmology appointments during COVID and beyondClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKDue to COVID-19, all routine face-to-face eye care appointments have been suspended (both in hospital ophthalmology and in community opticians). Since routine appointments comprise approximately 80% of all eye care appointments, and in 2019 eye units became the busiest hospital outpatient speciality, this is a major disruption for the NHS as a whole, and the 6 million patients in the UK who live with eye disease. The eye chart is a fundamental aspect of assessing eye health, and, founded by eye specialists, OKKO are a certified software medical device company that creates technology to provide this on smartphones (using pictures, not letters, via a simple, accessible video game interface that has been co-developed by children as young as 3 years old and adults up to 85 years!). Our patent-pending and CE-marked technology to date has been concentrating on chronic disease in adults. However, the cancellation of NHS eye appointments means that there's now huge demand for the product in paediatrics and also in urgent care, so we have been redeveloping our core tech for this purposes: 1. Home-monitoring children's vision for those undergoing at-home patching treatment for lazy eye (amblyopia) 2. For one-off urgent use during tele-ophthalmology video consultations Our technical work is nearly complete for our iOS product on Apple devices, however we urgently need to create an Android version for Samsung and Huawei phones, in order to meet NHS demand in an equitable way. In addition, we must urgently create an automated 'on-boarding' procedure for easy registration online. This means quickly doubling the size of our tech team to build the necessary stable and scalable platform. Last year NHS England had 7.86 million eye care appointments, just 3.7% which were seen by tele-health means (usually a telephone call to check on the patient's symptoms post-surgery).Given COVID-19, a full roll-out of tele-health is now essential, but the limiting factor is the ability to accurately measure sight in the home.OKKO's patent-pending technology specifically meets this need, and it's integration could ramp up the ability to deliver proper eye care during COVID and mitigate the effects the growing backlog of cancelled appointments and the continued impact of social distancing (ie doctors with asthma/diabetes who are shielding could instead be running clinics from their home). With the correct product acceleration, our technology could be used to raise the tele-health in ophthalmology to 50% by late 2020 and utilise the eye specialists who are shielding.