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Comment by RosanaAnaDana | Hacker News Reader

How reasonable would it be to the prescription process; for example, a kiosk in the mall where I sit in a booth and click (better/worse) while looking into some-kind of a vision testing device.

The whole thing is so procedural and really, not very difficult to administer. It seems like extremely low hanging fruit for automation.

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You can actually get a remarkably accurate prescription with no feedback at all.[1] You've almost certainly done this before as part of an eye exam. (Look in this machine at the balloon.)

The refraction portion of the eye exam is the least important one for medical reasons and the one that people think has the highest stakes (getting the right glasses.) The other parts of the eye exam (pressure testing, retinoscopy, etc.) are worth far more to your overall health.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorefractor

Optimizing for just "better or worse" will result in excessively strong correction. If you're only looking at a single letter in the very center of your field of vision, then overcorrection feels sharper and easier to focus on. You don't notice the additional optical artifacts everywhere else. The ideal glasses have just barely enough correction.

However, this isn't an argument against automation, because human optometrists frequently get it wrong too. I agree that it should be automated.

I've just always found myself frustrated by the sense that beyond looking into my eyes for signs of disease, the actual act of making a prescription could be done by anyone with an afternoon of training; yet I have to make an appointment and drop 100-200$ for something that is, on occasion, less effort than getting an order correct at chipotle.

In other countries the exams are totally free (basically because of the reasons you mention).

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