About Intelligent Diagnostics

Intelligent Diagnostics is an outgrowth of an idea conceived in 2015 by ophthalmologist David A. Wallace.  Multiple factors effectively combined to set the stage for what we now believe to be a significant window of opportunity in the niche industry of eye care diagnostic instrumentation:

• The vast majority of diagnostic instrumentation in eye care evolved in the 80s and 90s when desktop personal computers were the best tools generally available.  All of these took the form of specialized sensors attached to Windows pcs running proprietary software, and gave rise to autorefractors, topographers, aberrometers, perimeters, OCT, laser biometry, specular microscopy systems, combo devices and others.
• All of these instruments were relatively large, intending to mount on motorized tables; they took up a fair bit of floor space, and didn't fit into the basic exam room ("lane") that most eye doctors worked in.
• They also cost quite a bit of money, typically tens of thousands of dollars.
• The typical rule of thumb that manufacturers have used for generations is to price diagnostic hardware at 7 to 12 times the cost to manufacture (or more), building in all profit up front.
• As if that weren't enough, they would charge practitioners high to outrageous fees for annual service and maintenance contracts.
• Then, to add insult to injury, they would build in planned obsolescence, forcing practitioners to buy more expensive hardware every 5 to 8 years if possible.
• Smartphones appeared in the late 90s and became incredibly popular in the 2000s, in part due to massive expansion of processing power, memory, functionality, convenience, connectivity, portability and of course relatively low cost.  Major players in IT did not see this coming, including Microsoft and even Intel.  In about 2007, sales of mobile devices (and the CPUs that run them) started outselling desktop computers, and that trend continues to this day.
• Modern smartphones have exceptional cameras, better processing power, and much better built-in functionality than any desktop or laptop computer.
• None of the major manufacturers of ophthalmic diagnostic instrumentation seemed to be moving in the direction of embracing the mobile platform or a lower-cost model.
• Legacy systems all store data on either a local hard drive or one on a local network.
• Nobody else seems to recognize the value of aggregating data in the cloud, and using a global dataset for analytics, statistical analysis purposes, etc.

Dr. Wallace (who admits he's more than a bit of a computer nerd) decided there might be a better way to do things.  He formed the company and assembled an exceptional team of designers, optical engineers, programmers, fabricators and industry consultants to build the Delphi, our smartphone-based corneal topography system.