October 27, 2022
OKKO Health completes fundraising round to bring app to European market
OKKO Health announces close of a pre-seed round of £2 million, led by DVH Ventures, to support the launch of its eye health monitoring app in Germany
We believe that patients should spend quality time with doctors when they need it most (and safely avoid hospital when they don’t). Home-monitoring of vision between appointments will enable systems to deliver customised eye care and dynamic appointment schedules.
OKKO Health develops home-monitoring apps for measuring vision - we embed deep vision science behind simple games on smartphones and tablets. This has applications across clinical practice, scientific research and in R&D of new drugs and devices.
We’re not just building apps to measure vision the way it’s been done for decades. While we use well-established science to measure traditional ways to measure vision, we are always leveraging recent research to develop new vision tests and to capture how we really see the world in its many dimensions. This creates much more data than traditional measures; our home-monitoring technology has been specially designed to be able to harness this diversity of data to develop predictive algorithms to identify sight problems at the earliest possible opportunity.
This mission started back in 2015 when ophthalmologist Luke Anderson and optometrist and vision science researcher Stephanie Campbell were working together in a busy NHS hospital clinic in Cardiff, Wales. Both could see waiting lists growing and knew that half of eye clinic visits were made simply to monitor eye disease.
In theory, this monitoring could be done at home, and specialists could concentrate their time on those who were most in need. Stephanie and Luke also believed that vision testing could be both fun and automated using video games, and this would be especially useful in paediatrics. However, when building the first prototype, they realised that much more than just visual acuity (vision from a traditional eye chart) could be measured on a screen. This made it theoretically possible to measure and monitor vision across a wide variety of eye diseases - and in adults (luckily it turns out that adults enjoy playing simple games, too!)
OKKO Health worked with the University of Bristol to learn the science behind games and motivation, the importance of co-designing with patients and learning from them first. Passionate to learn how human-centred technology could be created for eye care, Stephanie completed a Creative Technology Fellowship to understand the principles of great automation and responsible data design.
Working at OKKO isn’t just a job, we’re not just about building great technology - it’s about protecting the sight of people locally and across the world.
We love finding really clever ways to do new things - if you do too please get in touch. Our doors are always open to meet incredible people who share our vision.
A flavour of how we think and what we do best in the world of digital health
June 30, 2020
Innovate UK funds digital health start-up to develop vision monitoring app for children
OKKO Health wins Innovate UK competition to develop technology in response to Coronavirus Pandemic
May 28, 2020
CE-marked smartphone app begins clinical trials in macular disease
Sight-saving ophthalmic technology from OKKO Health particularly benefits isolated patients
October 19, 2019
OKKO Health Selected as One of 11 Start-Ups on Bayer’s G4A Digital HealthPartnership Programme
OKKO Health, a UK-based software company specialising in tele-ophthalmology