Categories
- Accessibility (35)
- Assessment (1)
- Assistive Technology (70)
- Collaboration (30)
- Commercialization (42)
- Design (10)
- Disability (13)
- Education (116)
- Grant Writing (8)
- Implementation (71)
- Leadership (9)
- Marketing (24)
- News (81)
- Research (30)
- Technology Transfer (9)
- Universal Design [UD] (20)
- Videos (18)
- I Can Soar Video (13)
Dave Bevers, President, Sight Enhancement Systems
Tags:Design, Innovators, Profiles
Inquiries: 519-883-8400
sales@sightenhancement.com
http://www.sightenhancement.com/
Description of technology: Sight Enhancement Systems produces the Sci-Plus Series large display calculators capable of performing scientific, trigonometric, and statistical calculations. The ‘300′ model has speech output. Also offered is Wat-Cam, a high- performance video camera with 40X enlargement and image contrast and text thresholding enhancement for use with display systems or laptop computers.
Got involved in access technology issues through: “I think you tend to draw on personal experiences. My mother was a low-vision person—she had a degenerative, macular degeneration over a 15-year span. I was able to watch her vision and the things she could do slowly deteriorate. So that was input I began working from.”
On challenges, information exchange, and research: Sight Enhancement Systems is a “development company.” Much of the challenge of information exchange, funding, and partnership development is resolved through the existence in Canada the Ontario Technology Research Consortium, which promotes activities that lead to the development of new technologies within the vision device marketplace. “They fund us in taking the product through research into commercialization.” Dave’s model relies upon a fundamental division between research and development - he builds relationships with universities where basic research into algorithms occurs. He maintains an awareness of “what kinds of things are being successful” and may be candidates for development projects. Finally, products are sent forward to a separate manufacturer.
Finding out about needs: Dave is honest about the complexities of determining user needs: “I don’t understand the ‘disabled’ requirements well enough. In a typical engineering world you pretty well know what the product’s going to do and what the requirements are. The problem in working with the disabled is that there are so many varieties of disability and so many levels of it.”We are also fortunate to have access to information through our partnership with the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Sight Enhancement. This rehabilitation service provides intelligence on the needs and wants of a large clinical population of people with low vision and our design activities can be validated by the end users of these products. Thus, the research conducted by universities and the support of the consortium are critical.
On design principles:Dave’s emphasis is on a rapid development schedule: “I think the fundamental principle of designing products in half the time is that you have to design the product and the manufacturing process at the same time. So as soon as you conceptualize the product, you immediately want to figure out how you are going to manufacture it. The two are so tightly interwoven you cannot do the design and then pass it over the wall to a manufacturer who is then going to figure out how to make it. The trick for us is to keep the product as fluid as possible until the very last minute.” In this way, “prototypes you test are as close as they reasonably can be to what will be produced when you kick production alive.”
Seeing the world in new ways:Concomitant with his cited design principle, Dave is one of few interviewed developers who uses CAD extensively before a prototype is created by a third-party manufacturer: “We mess around with 3-D computer models - all the assembly methods are verified… the tooling needed, all of the machine parts, the folded up metal parts and all the bits in tooling you need to do it are essentially in place at that point. And the only way you can leave things that late is if you are very convinced that 3-D models are accurate.”
On users:Dave thinks a lot about an aging population, and fundamental shifts in the stereotype of the technology averse senior citizen when thinking of markets and futures: “The next group of elderly that are coming along have a totally different set of expectations. If you watch a student, you know, with a piece of technology these days, it is amazing. They have no fear, they will push buttons, they’ll make it work. Once they’ve been shown, once they’ve got it, they will be far more demanding in what they expect it to do. People expect ‘inter-connectability’ and interoperability with other applications.”
Views on the market: Sight Enhancement Systems’ experiences with the market demonstrate the need for research and making creative compromises. For their Wat-Cam, Dave initially wanted to develop a custom optical system: “It was 25 million dollars just to play the game, totally out of line. In the kind of market we’re in, there’s no possible way we could uniquely develop a camera system specifically for a low-vision user. So we’ve gone out to buy commercial imagers, then adapt them by putting software on the back of it to approximate the ideal design goal.”
On new horizons:Dave feels the future will bring “things like face recognition algorithms. If you had a hand held camera and you pointed it at somebody you may not be able to discern all of their features and know exactly who it is.” Such a device, with a memory bank recognizing the images of a set of friends and family, would identify an encountered individual to a person with memory or other difficulties.
Provocative views & quotes: Dave describes another ‘non-AT‘ product under development, and points to diversification that may be necessary for other AT companies: “It is a scanning product which uses slaughtered cow eyes in solution for laser refraction for toxic testing of chemicals.” This is being undertaken to deal with the low volume of AT products - “We needed to make some money!”
