This was years ago, sitting at the dinner table with her family, when Dr. Melissa Bailey noticed it, her little boy closing an eye to reach across the table for food.
Turned out, he was seeing double when he looked down. A nerve and muscle condition in his eye, called fourth nerve palsy, was missed during exams because it’s not an easy problem to spot even in a clinical setting.
The effects were significant. Bailey’s son – then in first grade – was often tired at school, struggling to read, even thought to possibly have ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder).
But because his mother was an optometrist, she found the source of the problem, changing the course of his life.
“My son would have had a completely different experience at school if we hadn’t found this problem,” says Bailey MS ’01, OD ’01, PhD ’04, a professor in Ohio State’s College of Optometry. “This affects a huge amount of his life. I couldn’t help but think about how many kids out there have these problems but we can’t find them.”
So, Bailey embarked down a path she never envisioned for herself: inventor.
Since then, Bailey’s patents and inventions have focused on improving lives by solving vision problems. Her innovations not only hold the promise for helping many people in the United States – young, old, underprivileged – but millions, even billions of people across the world who have undiagnosed vision problems.
“I feel a really strong personal sense that I have talents and I need to use them to make the world a better place. It’s what drives me a lot,” says Bailey, recognized by Ohio State’s Office of Research as Innovator of the Year in 2022 after earning the Early Career Innovator of the Year award in 2015. “Life is better when we develop what we have and use it to contribute to our community and world.
“I can’t help myself from thinking, how can we do this differently? How can we do this better? I can’t live with myself knowing I knew how to solve a problem and I didn’t take it forward.”
Bailey began by developing improved methods to measure the ciliary muscle in the eye, which can identify myopia in children. It resulted in numerous international patents for several inventions.
She then turned to developing two breakthrough products which led her to founding two startups: Lentechs, LLC, a novel soft contact lens that works like bifocal glasses, and OcuDoc, Inc., a smartphone application that can estimate a glasses prescription.
Both are still in development. Bailey has worked with Ohio State’s entrepreneurial community, local business developers and clinicians to bring her inventions to market.
“Everything she does, all these products, the goal is to develop something that makes a difference in a patient’s life,” says Dr. Jason Miller ’99 PhD, an optometrist in central Ohio who has collaborated with Bailey on many projects. “It’s not about her, Melissa really cares about helping people.
“And she thinks differently, she’s constantly thinking about how to do unique things that can make big changes, a big impact. She always seems to be on the cutting edge of how to offer the highest possible care to people. Getting an opportunity to work on innovative products like what Melissa has brought to our practice has made a big difference in the care we provide to our patients.”
Current bifocal contacts are often difficult for patients to adjust to because they don’t work the same as bifocal glasses. So, many people who would prefer to continue wearing contacts switch to glasses. The Lentechs contact will stay suspended in the eye and work like bifocal glasses.
“We’re all walking around with computers in our pocket that we change out every two years and there are 2.5 billion people in the world who can’t see. We have to do things to help people and correct their vision because it has a huge impact on their interaction with the world.”
Meanwhile, the OcuDoc Mobile app will estimate a patient’s prescription and measure eye alignment with a smartphone. It’s not a substitute for an eye exam, but could provide critical vision information for billions of people across the globe who are unable to have vision impairment needs addressed.
But it’s not just in developing nations that this tool could be invaluable. In the United States it could be used to give prescription information to those without access to doctors, children, for some elderly, and for autistic people who struggle to communicate or sit for an eye exam.
“We’re all walking around with computers in our pocket that we change out every two years and there are 2.5 billion people in the world who can’t see,” Bailey says. “We have to do things to help people and correct their vision because it has a huge impact on their interaction with the world.”
Not correcting vision leads to a host of problems, from delayed social and cognitive development to neurological decline and even significant economic burdens.
“I want to know that I changed people’s lives,” Bailey says. “Not just here but all across the world.”
