Childhood visual impairment (VI) has significant impact on the child and with far-reaching consequences for the child’s social and educational experiences and future career prospects.

The VQoL_CYP and FVQ_CYP are validated patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) which capture vision-related quality of life (VQoL) and functional vision (FV) and are designed for use by children and young people living with VI, to capture children’s own perspectives of the impact of VI. They are currently used as paper based questionnaires in research and routine clinic practice. However, clinicians and families would benefit from digitalising the process, allowing patients to complete questionnaires electronically with data automatically collected into a database for analysis.

In collaboration with UCL computer science, through the industry exchange network, researchers at GOSH and UCL GOS Institute of Child Health developed a proof of concept app was created to deploy both instruments digitally (collectively, ‘MyEyes’), complete with a database for analysis. The web application was developed using Django with a PostgresSQL database. The mobile app was developed using Ionic.

The digitalisation of the questionnaires has the potential to improve the child’s experience of self-completion. Deployment via a mobile app allows patients to complete questionnaires at sequential time-points, in-between normal clinic visits, thus providing clinicians with more information about their eye condition over time.

To gain feedback on the technology, patients and families will now test the prototype mobile app. This project demonstrates how PROMs can be digitalised, supporting a more efficient collection process for important patient-generated data. This prototype could serve as an example of how other PROMs in use at the hospital could be deployed digitally.