For eye-care professionals
Guby, for the clinic
A simple home tool you can recommend to families, in plain terms, with the honest limits stated up front.
You only have a few minutes between patients, so this is brief. Guby is a free Android app that helps a young child keep a healthy distance between their eyes and the screen. It is a behavioural nudge for the home, not a medical device and not a treatment. Here is what it does and, just as importantly, what it does not.
The clinical picture, briefly
You know this better than we do. Childhood myopia is rising, and while genetics and reduced time outdoors carry much of the weight, sustained near work at very short distances is among the modifiable factors families can actually influence. Time outdoors remains one of the most consistently protective behaviours in the literature (see, for example, this cohort analysis in Scientific Reports), and a comfortable working distance is sensible, low-cost advice.
For pre-literate children, the practical problem is that the usual advice, "hold it further away", doesn't land. Guby exists to make that one piece, viewing distance, easier to maintain at home, without nagging.
What Guby actually does
Guby uses the device's (phone or tablet) front camera to estimate the distance between the screen and the child's face in real time, on the device. When the screen comes too close, a friendly owl character covers it, and withdraws when the child moves back to a comfortable distance. The cue is visual, not only text, so it works for children too young to read. It may run only within a parent-chosen list of apps.
To be clear about scope: Guby does not measure refractive error, screen for myopia, or replace an eye examination. It encourages one healthy habit. We are explicit with families that it is one tool alongside the things that matter more, regular check-ups, outdoor time, and overall screen time limits.
Privacy and data
The distance estimate runs entirely on the device. No image or video frame is stored or transmitted, there is no face recognition, and no biometric template is created or kept. The app holds no personally identifying information about the child. The only data sent off-device is an anonymous weekly tally used to build a parent's email summary. Our handling is set out in full in the privacy policy, written against India's DPDP Act.
Recommending Guby to families
If it is useful to a family, the simplest path is to send them to guby.app, or to the how it works page. It is free during early access and available on Android 8.0 and newer. If a printable one-pager or a clinic QR code would help your families, write to us and we'll sort one out.
Talk to us
We would genuinely value your view, on the threshold we use, the wording, and anything that would make Guby more useful or more honest in a clinical setting. You can reach us at .