Your Eyes Are Paying the Price for Screen Time

Six hours. That's how long the average adult now stares at screens each day, and your eyes are keeping score. The bill comes due in dry eyes, blurred vision, headaches, and worsening nearsightedness—what doctors call the hidden epidemic of our smartphone era.

Edenlux, a South Korean startup, thinks it has found the antidote. The company has raised $99 million across two funding rounds to develop what it calls "vision training devices"—smart glasses that exercise your eye muscles back to health. Now, they're betting American consumers will pay to fix what their phones broke.

The Doctor Who Couldn't Wait

The story begins with founder Sungyong Park, a military physician who experienced temporary eye muscle paralysis after a routine injection. When doctors told him to simply wait for recovery, Park imported specialized equipment and began retraining his own eye muscles. His vision returned, but the experience left him with a mission: help others protect their sight in our screen-heavy world.

Edenlux's first product, Otus, launched in 2022 across Asia as a bulky VR-style device that contracts and relaxes the ciliary muscle—the tiny muscle that helps your eye focus. The results? $10 million in revenue and users reporting reduced dependence on reading glasses within 12 months.

But Otus was just the warm-up act. This March, Edenlux plans to launch Eyeary on Indiegogo, targeting the massive U.S. market. Unlike its predecessor, Eyeary looks like regular glasses, weighs less, and promises to cut treatment time in half—from 12 months to six months.

The Science of Screen Fatigue

Here's what happens inside your eyes during a typical workday: The ciliary muscle contracts to focus on your close-up screen, staying tensed for hours. "When people are young, the muscle is strong enough to focus," Park explains. "But constant smartphone use keeps it contracted, and over time, it can weaken, leading to fatigue and vision problems."

Eyeary addresses this with 144 diopter focal points (compared to Otus's five), allowing for more precise muscle training. The device connects to a mobile app via Bluetooth, collecting usage data and feeding it to Edenlux's AI system, which analyzes patterns across age, gender, and vision profiles to customize training programs.

The company positions itself as the Oura Ring of eye health—both collect human data and provide insights via subscription software, but while Oura focuses on sleep and heart rate, Edenlux targets vision and hearing recovery.

Beyond the Glasses

Edenlux isn't stopping at Eyeary. The company has developed a suite of devices targeting specific conditions: Tearmore for dry eyes, Lux-S for strabismus, Lumia for myopia prevention, and Heary for auditory recovery. Most will roll out in Asia first, but the strategy signals broader ambitions.

The company recently established a U.S. subsidiary in Dallas, where devices will undergo final assembly. More intriguingly, Park hints at partnerships with tech giants like Apple or Samsung to integrate vision-protecting technology directly into smartphones—potentially addressing the problem at its source rather than treating the symptoms.

The Bigger Picture

Edenlux's bet reflects a broader shift in how we think about digital wellness. As screen time continues climbing—and shows no signs of slowing—companies are racing to develop solutions for the physical toll of our connected lives. The market opportunity is massive: virtually everyone with a smartphone is a potential customer.

But questions remain about consumer adoption. Will people pay hundreds of dollars for smart glasses to fix problems they might prevent with better screen habits? Can a device-based solution truly address what is fundamentally a behavioral issue?

The crowdfunding launch will provide the first real test of American appetite for vision training technology. If successful, it could signal the emergence of a new category in consumer health tech—one that treats our devices not as inevitable sources of harm, but as problems with technological solutions.