The concept didn’t arrive in a moment’s inspiration. In fact, it took nearly 3 years of investing in research, debate, experiments, and thousands of hours of conversations and co-design, led by blind subject matter experts from around the world. Only after that did we begin to feel we'd developed an understanding of the blind experience that gave us a degree of confidence that we knew what we should be solving for.
In those early years, our first big lesson, which is now a company mantra, was: ‘‘you can't understand blindness by looking at it". Sighted assumptions about blindness are more often than not wrong; and this has led to sighted people consistently building the wrong solutions for the wrong reasons. The Assistive Tech (AT) and medical device markets for vision disability are a fairly consistent story of half-baked products and failures. We think a lack of customer insight is why. So we leaned into this reality, placing blind experience at the center of what we do. Our first hire was Marx Melencio, a brilliant software engineer who had been developing AT for over a decade, because he wanted to build a product that would help transform his experience of blindness. Now, a third of our senior staff is blind, and more than ever, we are led by our blind colleagues and their deep insights into what needs to be built, how it needs to work for our end users, and which problems we need to solve for.
- by the people who understand blindness best. We employ blind subject matter experts in key engineering, training and advocacy roles to lead and course-correct our sighted colleagues to success on a daily basis. We have developed our product and clinical trials with dozens of blind collaborators from around the world over the last 5 years.
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We invest in research translation and IP development as a driver of sustainable value, and to maintain a market leading position for the company.
Several new hardware and software technologies have been developed, and patents filed, for the core technology of the device including Augmented Reality in Audio, Audio User Interfaces (AUIs), novel control interfaces, ultra low-power Visual-Inertial SLAM, event camera and neuromorphic processing & low-power AI state-aware sensor systems for head worn devices.
ARIA is being developed as a Class 2a TGA, and FDA Class 1 Device, to ensure both user safety and evidence backed clinical trials. We work with leading eye research centers, disability support providers and government agencies to build a device to change lives, with the data necessary to support its deployment.
