Woman Gets 500 ‘Holes’ On Cornea From Extremely Bright Phone Screen

A 25-year-old Taiwanese woman has over 500 "holes" on the cornea because of using her smartphone with maximum screen brightness.

The woman, surnamed Chen, used to set her phone screen to maximum brightness. Chen worked as a secretary, which required her to use her phone all the time. Naturally, when she went out in the sun, she increased the brightness and forgot to lessen it. At nights, she watched movies without reducing the brightness. She got used to it and did not adjust the brightness.

In March 2018, she noticed something was wrong with her eyes. Chen used artificial tears to soothe the discomfort but it didn’t help. A few months later, the condition got worse and her eyes were bloodshot. She rushed to the hospital where Chen was informed that she had over 500 holes on her cornea. Doctors told her that her left eye vision was left with only 0.6 while her right vision was left with only 0.3. Since then, Chen was under medication and was slowly recovering.

Speaking to Apple Daily on Monday, Hong Qiting, a professor of ophthalmology attached to Pingtung Fuying University of Science and Technology said, Chen used over 625 lumens of brightness, which is far more than the general recommendation of 300 lumens.

He said if a person uses his phone for over two hours with maximum brightness, the person will have “short-sighted vision, red eyes, eye fatigue, severe dry eye, burning sensation and foreign body sensation, and then corneal lesions, that is, too high screen brightness will hurt the eyes, easy to induce Cataract and retinopathy.”

"The eyes are like under the oven, the white conjunctiva is baked into red conjunctivitis, and the black eyeball part of the conjunctiva is baked into an epithelial defect,” he added.

Qiting also recommended people to keep their phone in automatic brightness mode, which adjusts the brightness according to the environment.

In a similar incident in 2017, a 21-year-old girl from China went blind on one eye after playing games on her phone non-stop. The girl started playing after dinner one day and continued playing it non-stop until her right eye couldn’t see anything. She went to sleep and next morning she noticed her eye was the same. Her parents took her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with retinal artery obstruction. Playing the game continuously had made her eyes incredibly fatigued, resulting in the condition, World Of Buzz reported.