Team behind tool to help kids wear contact lenses with ease wins $50k grant

Putting on contact lenses for the first time can be challenging, even more so for children.

- Osmond Chia

Ms Yan Ng, 49, said her youngest daughter, Colette, who was 10 at the time, struggled whenever her mother's finger approached her eye to apply a corrective contact lens – a hard lens designed to reshape the wearer's cornea and slow down the progression of short-sightedness.

Ms Ng, a human resources consultant, performed this routine twice daily – once in the evening before her daughter went to bed and again in the morning to remove the lenses – until Colette, now 13, finally learnt to do it herself about four months later.

"She couldn't stay still at the start," the mother of two told The Sunday Times. "She wasn't used to having something pushed towards her eye, so she would keep on blinking. It was a bit of a struggle at first."

Such a struggle is likely to go away soon, now that researchers have created a pocket-size prototype to make it easier for children to put on contact lenses.

On March 19, the team of three won a $50,000 grant during the third run of the annual Duke-NUS Health Innovator Programme challenge, paving the way for commercial use. With the grant, the team aims to refine its prototype, with plans to start clinical trials by 2026.