A five week diary study put a century old relaxation technique inside a smartphone headset and watched what happened to myopia.
Myopia is one of the most common vision problems in the world, and it keeps growing. The paper opens with a projection that shortsightedness will affect 52 percent of the global population by 2050, with rates of 70 to 80 percent among young adults in parts of Europe and East Asia.
Glasses, contact lenses and corrective surgery help people see, but they are expensive and do not address the underlying cause. The Bates method, developed by the New York ophthalmologist William Horatio Bates, takes a different route. Its core claim is that the eye reaches its best acuity when it is fully relaxed, and it offers concrete routines such as palming, shifting, sunning and blinking.
The authors built an Android application that runs on a phone slotted into a mobile headset. Their first job was deciding which parts of the method a headset can actually deliver. Some techniques survived the move, and some clearly did not.
Fourteen participants took part, seven men and seven women aged 21 to 42, all with myopia and some wearing glasses. They were asked to run the routine twice a day, morning and evening, and to keep a retrospective diary for 30 days.
After five weeks there was no significant difference in myopia levels between participants. The average change was still encouraging: a reduction of 0.13 diopter, with a small standard deviation, which suggests the measurement was at least consistent.
Participants also reported eye fatigue during long headset sessions, and described the guided routine as simpler, faster and more enjoyable than their usual habits. The authors present this as a preliminary feasibility result rather than proof that the method works.
Brata, K. C., et al. (2023). Virtual reality eye exercises application based on bates method: a preliminary study. Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
