17-year-old turns myopia struggle into a 20:20:20 rule website for eye health using AI: ‘Don’t take eyes for granted'
She Slays: Meet 17-year-old Annanya Desai, who suffers from severe myopia and created an online platform advocating for the 20-20-20 rule to benefit eye health.
Waking up and being able to see clearly is something that 17-year-old Annanya Desai has never known. The first thing she sees every morning is a blur of shapes and shadows, with rough edges blending into each other. Annanya struggles with severe myopia in both eyes; she has a prescription of -10.50 in the right eye and -11.00 in her left eye. She has also seen her grandmother battle glaucoma. These personal experiences, coupled with her passion for technology and coding, led her to create an online platform to encourage eye health through timed pauses, breathing cues, and evidence-based eye care tips like the 20-20-20 rule.
Annanya tells Health Shots She Slays: “We talk about back pain, we talk about sleep cycles - but eye health, the very thing that enables us to see the world, is often ignored.”
For Annanya, it was hard to ignore the reality.
“I remember sitting next to my nani (maternal grandmother) as she squinted at her phone. I tried to help her by enlarging the text, but the harsh blue light and the constant strain didn’t just exhaust her eyes, it took a mental toll on her too. She often looked frustrated, like even small daily tasks had become battles. That image stayed with me,” she shares.
Living with severe myopia
On the personal front, with online classes, notes, coding assignments, and 12th grade board preparations, Annanya is also on screens for hours every single day. “The headaches, eye strain, and that overwhelming drop in productivity after long sessions, made me realize just how invisible this problem is,” she adds.
Talking about the challenges of living with an eye prescription over -10D, she says, “For most people, slipping on their glasses is optional. For me, wearing lenses is non-negotiable... Some mornings, I just don’t feel like putting them in, but skipping my lenses means I literally can’t function. And if a lens falls out during school? Without a spare pair, I’d have to leave and go home. Even glasses don’t fully help; with such a high number, they strain my eyes. These small, everyday inconveniences pile up. They remind me that eyesight isn’t something we should ever take for granted.” she adds.
Even when she looks around her classroom, the Mumbai-based girl notices people rubbing their eyes, squinting at the board, or pushing through headaches in silence. In her opinion, the Covid-19 pandemic made it worse.
“We went from a few hours of screen use to living our entire lives - classes, assignments, even friendships - through digital devices. That’s when I realized: eye strain isn’t just my personal challenge. It’s a generational issue. And the fact that it’s ‘invisible pain’ means it rarely gets the attention it deserves,” adds the student of Jamnabai Narsee School.
This pattern became the seed for VisualEyes, Annanya’s website to help others beat digital eye strain through a simple, practical platform that anyone, at any age, could use. It is inspired by the 20-20-20 rule, a mnemonic designed to help prevent digital eye strain, also known as Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS). This involves taking a break from your screens every 20 minutes to look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.
Why is the 20:20:20 rule good for eye health?
Dr Pooja Prabhu, Consultant Ophthalmologist at Dr Agarwals Eye Hospital, explains: “It gives the eye’s focusing system a reset and encourages blinking to rehydrate the corneal surface. Studies show that this rule is highly effective in reducing visual fatigue and accommodative stress, especially for people engaged in intensive screen work. Setting reminders can help build this into a habit.”
That’s where Annanya's platform can help - by assisting you to with a 20-minute reminder via a focus timer while you continue working on your computer screen.
Apart from following this 20-20-20 rule herself, what are the other habits she has adopted for eye care? Annanya says she has cut down unnecessary screen time, eats more foods rich in vitamin A and omega-3s like carrots, spinach and walnuts, uses prescribed low-dose atropine drops at night, and does basic eye exercises when she can.
What is inspiring is how she channelized her challenges with her eye condition into creating an innovation that is both practical and meaningful.
She shares: “I developed VisualEyes through a process called vibe coding, which is essentially leveraging AI as a collaborative coding partner. Instead of writing everything line by line, I guided the AI with prompts and refinements, while still using my own knowledge of web design and programming to structure the core.”
Beyond web development, the teen techie says she also knows Python and Java. “I’ve built AI models before - for example, training neural networks to classify spoken digits and to distinguish between pathological and normal breath sounds. That project was part of my mission to make healthcare more widely accessible, so I’ve had experience not just in coding but in applying AI for real-world impact,” shares Annanya, who is also fascinated by the world of robotics.
