Smartphone Vision Syndrome Associated with Prolonged Use of Digital Screen for Attending Online Classes during COVID-19Pandemic among Medical Students:A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: Smartphone vision disorder is a complex of eye and vision related problems associated with close work during use of digital screen. It is one of the rising wellbeing concerns identified with innovation (phones and tablets) because of constant utilisation of Smartphones among medical undergraduates particularly during the last five months due to COVID-19 pandemic for attending online classes. Aim: To investigate the impact of online classes on development of Digital Vision Syndrome (DVS) among undergraduate medical students. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 280 undergraduate medical students from 1st and 2nd professional MBBS course attending online classes regularly from the last five months. The authors evaluated the student’s perception based on the symptoms experienced in the last five months through a pre-tested questionnaire related to DVS which are caused due to two mechanisms: (i) accommodative mechanism; (ii) ocular surface mechanism by using 5-point Likert scale. The association between development of DVS symptoms and risk factors like distance of eyes from the screen, refractive errors, duration of exposure and size of screen was analysed by factor analysis and ANOVA through EpiInfoTM for windows version 7.2.4. Results: In the present study, 78.2% of students were using smartphones and 21.8% were using large screen for reading and attending online classes during the lockdown period. It was observed that the descriptive statistics elaborates the overall mean of approximately score 3 in all 280 students on Likert scale. In regard to distance at which digital screen was kept, students who kept less distance (> arm and forearm length) are at higher risk of DVS development (p