APAO 2024 at Bali and OUI Inc.
OUI Inc. participated at APAO (Asia-Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology) 2024 in Bali, Indonesia.
OUI Inc. also had 3 speakers at the conference: Dr. Eisuke Shimizu, Mr. Hiroki Nishimura, and Mr. Shintaro Nakayama. Dr. Rohan Jeetendra Khemlani also joined but was not presenting.
Overall, it was extremely busy! Already on the first day, even before setting up the booth, we had curious people coming in — who are now our partners! This was a great sign!
As you can see on the picture, the booth is not set up yet, but we already had interest!
Initially, the empty booth look like this:
But then, after setting it up, it looked like this:
A huge eye-catching point was all the pictures we had. This attracted a lot of doctors who do rural area screenings, as those were our pictures. Although it looked very DIY, we had more traction than anyone around us! Our biggest problem was that we did not have enough staff members to accomodate all of the interested potential collaborators or buyers!
We showed off our slit-lamp model, ophthalmoscope model, the fundus camera models, and sometimes even the retinoscope!
Our diverse team, the various personalities, and linguistic abilities shined more than they ever have before due to the nature of the event. Due to having a team with native English, Japanese, Hindi (similar to Urdu), Spanish, French, and Russian speakers, we were able to make a great impression on the attendees & converse with them.
Everyone was quite impressed:
We have now close to 100 people willing to collaborate with us in various way: from performing feasibility studies to using the SEC in rural screenings.
We also sold 8 devices and 6 of them in one sale by this team:
Dr. Eisuke’s presentation:
Mr. Hiroki’s presentation:
Mr. Shintaro’s presentation:
We also met some friends from before! Dr. Minh from Vietnam and Dr. Giuseppe from Italy (who recently published a paper about the slit-lamp model!):
Overall, this event was a massive success:
What did we learn and what can we do better next time?
- We need some bigger posters, and multiple of them, different ones
- We need to have large clear slit, ophthalmoscope, and fundus camera pictures on the posters!
- A lot of people were interested in fundus cameras, so we will put more effort into that; because the fundus cameras are just prototypes, but it looks like the huge interest in them means that we should proceed faster with them
- We definitely need more plugs, chargers, extension cords, and devices for the customers to try out!
- We need to have more people or put out more video material online for people to look at (maybe through a QR code), because we did not have enough staff members to accomodate everyone’s interest
- We need maybe 4–5 x more flyers (yes 400–500% more), as we ran out very fast each time we tried to give them out
Overall… It was a MASSIVE SUCCESS, beyond our imagination! See you next year, in APAO 2025 Delhi!
