One of the newest Tangerine innovations in progress at RTI is Tangerine:Acuity- a free vision screening application built into the Tangerine platform.
The idea behind Tangerine:Acuity is rooted in the belief that early detection of vision issues can drastically improve learning outcomes. Often, children struggling in the classroom due to undiagnosed vision difficulties can go unnoticed, leading to academic challenges that could be easily prevented with timely intervention. Tangerine:Acuity addresses this by offering a quick, accessible vision screening tool as part of Tangerine’s open source student assessment and teacher support platform.
Developed alongside experts at local North Carolina universities, the application is designed to work across a wide range of settings. Whether used in schools, health centers, or other community services, Tangerine:Acuity can be used by anyone, from teachers to healthcare workers, with minimal training. The goal is to make vision screening both easy and cost-effective, helping bridge gaps in under-resourced areas.
Traditional vision screenings often rely on eye charts with letters, but these can be problematic for younger children or individuals who have not yet mastered letters or developed full spatial awareness. Tangerine:Acuity takes this into account by using a smarter, more inclusive approach with The Auckland Optotypes. These open-source pictograms were specially developed for use with younger populations.
For teachers and laypersons, this tool offers an efficient way to conduct screenings without needing specialized medical knowledge. The simplicity of the process, paired with easy-to-understand results presentation can provide a first step to a referral pathway, followed by a medical evaluation and any services needed by each child.
In schools, Tangerine:Acuity also offers an important benefit: integration with student assessment data. By incorporating vision screening directly into the Tangerine platform, teachers can easily match screening results to other educational data, allowing them to better track and address learning challenges. This integration of data with academic performance information could lead to improved support for children who face vision-related obstacles to learning.
The application was tested with 120 students in Guatemala City and outcomes compared those from a mobile eye clinic. The tool showed incredibly promising results- high agreement with the eye clinic results and a low rate of false negatives. RTI is continuing to refine the tool and the training materials while we are working to seek FDA approval and hope to have more to share with the community later in 2025!
If you are interested further piloting Tangerine:Acuity with us, please reach out to Carmen Strigel at cstrigel@rti.org.
Check out more information on the tool here at www.tangerinecentral.org.
