Louise Allen
Preventing child blindness by improving the accuracy, racial equity and access of infant eye screening.
Project
Cambridge Medical Innovation Ltd
URL
Year founded
2020
Business stage
Pre-Seed
High-growth sectors
Life Sciences
Sector
Health
Location
East of England
Funding
Highly Commended Applicant
The problem and opportunity
Cataracts are the most common preventable cause of child blindness worldwide. Vision develops in the first 3 months, and delayed treatment causes a lifetime of blindness at huge personal and socio-economic cost.
All babies are screened at birth using a handheld torch but a third of cataracts are missed and thousands of babies are referred unnecessarily. Accuracy is particularly poor in black and Asian babies and when the screener is inexperienced.
The solution and innovation
Duocam has been optimised by clinical trial experience in over 40,000 babies. It comprises an optical hardware smartphone accessory, software application & cloud image storage and AI. Its illumination settings optimise imaging for all ethnicities. On-device ML alerts for poor image quality or potential abnormality, while image cloud hosting supports telemedicine, reducing the time to diagnosis and unnecessary travel and anxiety for parents.
Market and ambition
Duocam will be Hardware as a Service (HaaS), with postal delivery minimising distribution expense and software updates for subscribers. We anticipate early UK adoption by GPs and NHS trusts before widespread international uptake with trial publications indicating superior accuracy & screener preference for the technology.
Founder perspective
Dr Allen is an internationally recognised clinician researcher. Based at Cambridge University, she has been awarded more than £4m of grant funding to develop and test her inventions targeted to prevent avoidable blindness in infants and children. She has previously commercialised DigiVis, now scaling in the NHS.
Women in Innovation Award
Highly commended applicant of the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award 2025/26, receiving tailored business support, and access to specialist training and networks. View all winners and highly commended applicants from the Women in Innovation cohort 2025/2026.