JERUSALEM — At some point, after hours of speech therapy, countless consultations with child specialists and thousands of dollars spent without much progress to help my dyslexic daughter, Gefen, learn to read, I was at a loss for how to move forward.
No one else could.
A visit this week to Jerusalem high-tech company, OrCam, indicated that my theory was not just derived from lazy parenting but a real intuition that evolving technology has huge potential for all matter of visual and learning difficulties.
OrCam was set up five years ago by the same folks who brought us the accident avoidance system Mobileye, that little camera that sits on your vehicle to stop it — or us — from colliding with a foreign object.
The company has been exploring the field of artificial intelligence and for now has settled on developing a device aimed primarily at enhancing the quality of life for the blind and visually impaired.
It's called MyEye.
The device is comprised of a smart camera connected to a tiny computer that attaches to a pair of glasses. The camera can be programmed to identify places, people and products. And, more important, it reads text. Not just one or two random words but entire books.
As well as helping those with vision disabilities, MyEye could also assist millions of children, like my daughter, keep pace with their classmates even as they take a bit longer to learn to read, or even if they never learn to read.
During our visit to OrCam, Gefen tried out MyEye. Setting a pair of blue plastic rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose and using her finger to point at newspaper articles, a whole wealth of information opened up before her.
In real time, the camera scanned the sections of text she highlighted and read back to her in a computer generated voice — choose from Kendra or Brian — what was written there.
“The device makes reading a technicality not a skill,” said Yonatan Wexler, OrCam’s executive vice president of research and development.
He said that as well as allowing people with low sight to improve their everyday lives, it could also become a tool for fighting illiteracy.
Mobileye co-founder Amnon Shashua, who also founded OrCam with partner Ziv Aviram, sees the technology in broader terms.
“We wanted to create something that would be moving with us all the time, something that would incorporate artificial intelligence and something that would benefit society,” he said. “I needed a market to justify investing millions of dollars in developing this, and this is it.”
The next stage, said Shashua, is a wearable device called MyMe, which scans and processes the data around us and transmits it to our cellphones or computers to remind us of what we did or saw throughout the day. That is still a prototype.
In the meantime, OrCam is being marketed in the United States, Canada and Britain. The company has already reached a deal with the California Department of Rehabilitation, which will supply MyEye to qualifying blind and visually impaired state residents.
At this stage, MyEye costs $3,500 and can only be bought directly from the company.
Moshe Fischer, 66, who was diagnosed with ocular albinism at age 5 and is considered legally blind, is one of a 1,000 or so people who have been lucky enough to test MyEye as part of its trials. Until now, Fischer used an electronic magnifying glass to read everything from his cellphone to books, but since being fitted with MyEye his life has changed.
“In the past, I could read a book but it would take me a long time and was a strain on my eyes. Now I have read hundreds of books,” Fischer said. “I spent a lot of time with eye doctors, but there is not much they can do for me. My condition can’t be corrected.”
Fischer said that when he was young, he never thought there would be “all the things there are now, but these glasses have tremendous potential for people like me.”
As for Gefen, a teenager, wearing a plastic pair of glasses and having a computer-generated voice whisper the answers in her ear might not yet be a passable solution to overcome her learning disability.
"I could definitely use this, but I would never take it to school," she said during the MyEye demo. "It’s too embarrassing."
Here’s hoping that technology such as MyEye will eventually lead us to that perfect solution for Gefen.
