Angela Mitchell presenting at Silmo Singapore

Although this year was just its second eyewear exhibition and fair, Silmo Singapore 2024 attracted more than 250 brands and thousands of delegates to the Suntec City Exhibition Centre.

The trade exhibition showcased both Asian and French frame brands as well as a wide range of lenses, equipment and accessories, while Silmo Talks offered a series of lectures and drop-in sessions providing practical insights into the business of optics. Topics ranged from ‘Eyecare in the age of AI’ to my presentation on ‘A guide to professional frame adjustments’, which included a hands-on workshop with frames and tools.

Angela Mitchell and JF Rey's international sales director Pierre-Yves Chouvet. 

Part of the international Silmo Academy, the lectures programme featured leading researchers, optometrists and dispensing opticians from around the world and covered a variety of clinical topics. They were grouped into three key themes: over 45’s, under 45’s and ocular health/patient well-being and all had CPD accreditation - worth keeping in mind if you’re heading to Europe next year with a Singapore stopover, especially as Singapore is a such a vibrant and interesting place to spend a few days.

Fellow New Zealander and renowned MC and ADONZ speaker Stephen Caunter gave a series of excellent business-focused presentations. One attendee from South Africa commented that he had learnt more from Caunter’s sessions than he had in 20 years of business coaching.

Particularly enjoyable was Grant Hannaford’s talk ‘How to choose a progressive power lens: optical modelling and image shaping – roles in spectacle lens design’. Hannaford is an optical dispenser, co-owner of Hannaford Eyewear in New South Wales and co-founder and director of the Academy of Advanced Ophthalmic Optics Australia. He is also the first and only qualified lens designer in Australia and is in the process of completing a doctorate focusing on children’s eye development.

Author of Pure Optics and speaker Phernell Walker, Silmo Academy scientific director Elaine Grisdale, Angela Mitchell, Australia's Thao and Grant Hannaford and former IOA president Fiona Anderson. 

In his talk, Hannaford, distilled the mathematical complexities around progressive lens design (such as average position of wear, behavioural or postural assumptions and biometric analysis) into practical considerations of parameters that can be manipulated by the dispensing optician. These include the corridor and design bias and measuring the position of wear on patients to check if this significantly deviates from normative values. He also discussed the concept of ‘binocular summation’ - the ability of the visual system to take two images at a given acuity and combine them, resulting in an acuity (ideally) greater than either of the two component images. When a lens is designed with biometry input, the result is better binocular summation and an extension of the uncrowded window: a concept I have observed in practice with clients collecting their new Hoya progressive lenses and regularly seeing better on the reading chart than expected. Overall, an improved understanding of the variability in human ocular biometry has opened new opportunities for the development of highly customised progressive lens designs, leading to greater patient satisfaction.

Angela Mitchell is a dispensing optician and business partner at Orewa Optics. She is the immediate past president of the Association of Dispensing Opticians in New Zealand (ADONZ) and was an International Optician of the Year finalist in 2023.