(Revised April, 2004)
Background
This software program was developed by Skip Charles using the expertise of the late Dr. Philip Richmond for the use of Friends of ASAPROSAR (Asociacion Salvadoreņa Pro Salud Rural -- Salvadoran Association for Rural Health).
Friends of ASAPROSAR run an annual eye clinic in Santa Ana, El Salvador and maintain a permanent on-site inventory of approximately 10,000 pairs of used glasses. Phil Richmond was a founder of the program, which started in 1986.
Most of the dispensing of glasses is done by lay volunteers. At the beginning the inventory was stored by gender, add, right-eye sphere and cylinder. Finding glasses proved to be time-consuming and difficult. So we developed the program to inventory the glasses, giving each a unique number. The program then takes a prescription and looks for the best match considering spherical equivalents and axis tolerances, which depend on cylinder. It is as though Phil is sitting on your shoulder and helping you choose.
The REIMS Program is free shareware
Download these two .zip files to a new folder (we suggest you name the new folder REIMS) by clicking on their names:
After downloading REIMSFIL.zip and REIMSPRG.zip, unzip the files in the new folder (directory).
The folder will initially contain old ASAPROSAR data for playing with the program. Utilities provide for deleting that data to begin use with new data.
The manual for REIMS is the text file REIMSMAN.TXT that is included in the above .zip files.
If you have Microsoft Word, you can download a .doc version of the manual that you may prefer over the text file. Download the following .zip file for the Word version:
The manual is also available as an Acrobat Reader (PDF) file. Click here to download the PDF file.
You may wish to print the manual out to work your way through the program. Click to read the manual as a Web page now.
To run the program, double click on the file name REIMS.EXE in the REIMS folder (directory).
REIMS.EXE was written in FoxPro 2.6 for Windows. Although the program responds to mouse clicks, it was designed to operate with the keyboard for most functions. The idea here was that entry of data is keyboard-intensive and should not require a mouse to save or cancel entries.
Contact, follow-up, questions
Skip Charles can be contacted at hjcharles@post.harvard.edu. He welcomes feedback, comments and suggestions.
Penrose, Inc., as a public service.