Papers for

school health coordinators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

SightSentinel turns classroom screens into vision screening tools

OptoAgent: A Trustworthy Multi-Agent Framework for Opportunistic Vision Micro-Screening in Classroom Environments

Abstract: A child with reduced distance vision often does not know that anything is wrong. Children adapt, move closer, and rarely report the difficulty, so the problem can survive years of schooling before an adult notices. School screening addresses part of this, but it runs on a schedule, depends on staffing, and is separated from the classroom moments where the difficulty appears. Smartphone and web-based acuity tests have widened access, yet every one of them still needs somebody to start a test. We present SightSentinel, an architecture that turns a wall display a child already reads from into a recurring screening site. Ordinary educational content carries short calibrated optotype probes, and eight specialized agents divide the work. Perception agents recover viewing distance, recognition accuracy, approach behavior, gaze stability, response latency, and interocular difference from each encounter. A quality agent discards observations taken under bad geometry, poor lighting, or inattention. A longitudinal agent accumulates only the surviving evidence against the child's own baseline, and an orchestrator reports a Vision Concern Score routed through a safety gate whose output range excludes diagnosis, refraction, prescription, and reassurance. The design question is whether many cheap, noisy, well-gated encounters can reach a referral decision that one scheduled test reaches late or misses. We state the formulation, the architecture, a four-stage validation protocol against clinical reference standards, and the conditions under which the approach should be rejected.

Sun 13 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Children with poor distance vision often don’t realize they have a problem because they adjust naturally, so vision issues can go unnoticed for years. The authors designed SightSentinel, a system that uses regular classroom wall displays to secretly test children’s eyesight repeatedly during lessons. The system uses multiple specialized software agents to observe and analyze how children see and respond to small vision tests embedded in educational content. With careful quality control and combining many small tests over time, it aims to spot vision problems earlier than traditional scheduled screenings.
Open 2609.14514v1