Dr. Henry Greene is on a mission to help the near-blind see at full vision again. Greene, founder and president of Ocutech, a Chapel Hill-based company, has developed small telescopic binoculars that fit onto the normal rims of glasses.

The product, the Sightscope FLIP, is designed to help clarify and extend the visual field for the 4.5 million visually-impaired Americans.

The device is designed to fit on nearly every pair of glasses and is able to be moved out of the way when not in use. The company soft-launched the device to patient’s in the Triangle earlier this year, and will formally launch the product later this month.

“In the past, I couldn’t tell if faces had eyes on them,” said Steve Goetz, an early user of the Sightscope FLIP. “Now, I can see expressions, and watch fingers tick.”

“The value here is incredible. I have ten times the field of vision as I did without it.”

Ocutech, co-founded in 1984 by Dr. Greene and Russ Pekar, originally licensed the concept behind a telescopic device for the visually impaired to RTI International.

While RTI was successful in patenting the original concept, the organization was unable to help the inventors commercialize the technology, so Pekar and Greene decided to found a company in order to bring the device to market.

The founders brought on a third partner, Mike Levine, and bought the rights to the patent back from RTI. Using grant money from First Flight Venture Center (known at the time as the North Carolina Technological Development Authority), the company actively started pursuing commercialization.

The key, said Greene in an interview, was the training the young company received in writing compelling grant applications to the NIH, and in particular, to the National Eye Institute.

The National Eye Institute awarded the company three grants, from which two viable products were launched with commercial success, and are still sold by the company.

“There are only three things to help people who are visually impaired,” said Greene. Either they’ll get better glasses, they can move closer to the object that they are attempting to view, or they can use a device to help the object appear closer than it actually is.

“New studies show that people who lose vision are more impacted and have more of a detriment to their quality of life when they have a distance vision problem rather than a reading ability problem,” Greene added.

“We were trying to devise a device that would maximize a field of view. If we could find a way to make a telescope autofocus, it would become a much more natural process for the patient.”

Ocutech originally developed this technology – and it was this technology that put the company on the map in the 1980s and allowed the company to grow through the ’90s and this past decade, he added.

A few years ago, the company started the planning process to broaden their offering to serve more patients. According to Greene, the company wanted to take the hassle and risk out of prescribing a device for the visually-impaired.

The company, operating with a lean six employees, bootstrapped the new product design and conducted a limited release earlier this year.

The device is a completely different technology from the company’s other offerings, said Greene. One difference lies in the mechanical mounting, which makes it easier for the prescribing doctor, and more importantly, easier for a patient to use.

The company is profitable and virtually all of the profits are funneled into more research and development, he added. With five patents on the device technology, and one patent pending, the company is considering what it would take in order to further reduce the price point and extend the device to a broader market.

The device is more expensive than traditional glasses, said Evelyn Robertson, a patient of Greene’s who started using the device two weeks ago, “but it’s well worth it.”

Robertson said that the device now enables her to see letters, numbers and objects that she otherwise couldn’t, like the numbers on the arriving bus at her bus stop.

Using the device has changed her life, said Robertson, even considering the additional expense, which is typically three or four times the cost of high-end glasses. There are other technologies and companies that offer devices for the visually-impaired, but the Sightscope FLIP is the most affordable option.

“The FLIP opens up a world to you that you haven’t been able to see,” said Robertson, “I would recommend the device for anyone who has limited vision but is interested in going beyond what they could normally see.”

Greene realizes cost remains a barrier.

“It would be wonderful if we could reduce cost of the device so that anyone could afford it,” said Greene, but in order to be able to do that, “the company would have to build a whole lot of them.” Doing so would require a large capital investment, but Greene is hesitant to bet on rampant growth and mass-market appeal for the Sightscope FLIP.

He’s hoping that he wouldn’t have to take on investment – and with the launch of Ocutech’s latest medical device, he may not have to do so.