The Company and the Technology

OneWrite isn’t an assistive technology company—its bread and butter is selling devotional supplies to some 20,000 churches. However, its Vice President, Ray Schmidt, is a self-described “geek” who happens to have a son with autism. That mix, along with a concerned entrepreneurial spirit and a fresh look at the market, led to the development of a new kind of augmentative communication device—Cyrano. Cyrano allows users to program in specific phrases or words that will be called up and vocalized by the system when they press icons on the screen. However, it is layered into the platform offered by the HP iPAQ rx3715 Mobile Media Companion handheld PDA—and all the communications mobility and power that base design entails. Ray explains,

We wanted a less expensive device. Most are custom manufactured and you can imagine that the market isn’t huge. The average price of a machine in this market is about five thousand dollars. We market our machine at twelve hundred dollars. The hardware that’s available to the masses is so sophisticated and it grows at such an incredible rate… our feeling was that making that technology available to the consumer (with special needs) more quickly was a big deal.

Unique Aspects of the Company

Ray’s innovative thinking has extended further in terms of bringing the power and access of a modern PDA to bear for persons with a combination of specialized and conventional communication needs. He emphasizes,

Our device has a touch screen, speaker, microphone, two wireless networks—both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth—an infra red transmitter, and a built-in camera. For us the camera is very important. As we were looking at this population we really wanted to serve people who need to communicate visually. That would include people who have had traumatic brain injury who have had the language center in their brain damaged in some way or the child with autism.

View the tutorials.

Pointing out that photographs are immediately meaningful and concrete in ways that competitors’ abstract icons may not be, he continues,

Take my own son who has autism: if you show him a symbol of a bus he understands what that means pretty quickly, but you show him a symbol for “grandmother” he doesn’t have a clue. You show him a picture of his grandmother, and there’s no question what that is. Kids can spend a lot of time learning the meaning of symbols. We wanted to use real photographs.

On Collaboration

Ray’s conception of a natural, but ambitious collaboration would place his device in the mainstream communications technologies. He explains,

My dream—where I’d love to see this go—is I think this is a natural fit for a partnership with a cell phone provider. This would, to some degree, reduce the cost even further by developing a partnership that would allow this to be just a normal option that people could choose in terms of communication. It makes sense to me that that would be through a telephone company.

He is quick to add that existing partnerships with Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Otterbox have already proven invaluable.

Policy, Legislation, and Standards

While many developers presently report feeling relatively little direct impact of policy on activity, Ray vehemently points to a rule established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that he feels favors the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) of general communication devices over kids with needs. He indicates,

There’s a requirement from CMS for funding that devices must be dedicated speech communication devices. What that means is you cannot use them for anything else. What happens then is if Medicaid or Medicare is paying for the device, manufacturers lock down their devices so that you can’t use anything else with them.

Ray objects to the barriers that are imposed by this rule that works against a seamless continuum of mutually supportive functionality; the added cost after the device has already been purchased at market price; and the apparently inherent assumption that families with kids who have disabilities would abuse the system and buy devices for inappropriate uses. As an alternative, he favors a system which makes it easy to obtain devices and full interactive functionality, but which reviews use vigorously and returns devices back into a loan pool when and if they are not being used. He believes this would be far more fiscally responsible with taxpayer dollars, saving millions. Learn more about funding guidelines.

Knowing Users and User Requirements

Ray learned about user requirements from first-hand experience:

When my son first started to use similar devices at school, before Cyrano, the teachers and speech therapists would generally send the device home to me to program. They would say that these systems were impossibly hard to program. I would go in and look at them as a geek! To me their systems were not only simple, but I found most of our competitor’s devices have a very elegant interface. It really humbled me to think that these really easy-to-understand interfaces are throwing people for a loop. So when we started programming ours, we actually went back to those same professionals several different times in an effort to make ours as concrete as possible.

Ray’s choices in design reflect his affinity for the elegant: they are so continuous and interdependent that one benefit naturally flows from another. Still, Ray emphasizes the ease of use and training by pointing out,

One of our principles here was not only did it have to be simple to use, but it had to be simple to program. If only the speech therapists are programming it, it’s going to make this device much less useable. The families, and hopefully in many cases the individuals themselves, have got to be able to program this for it to be truly dynamic. If you look at our interface, it’s very visual. In fact, when you enter the programming interface, you actually see a full miniature working copy of that screen within the programming screen, and as you touch it, it works the way it’s going to work, so it’s actually a machine within a machine.

Ray is also quick to state that OneWrite targeted a select portion of the AAC and related markets—those who did not have major physical needs and were not necessarily using wheelchairs; who needed the mobility of a device that only weighs 6.5 ounces; or who may function well with text and who have fine motor control. This has proven a sizable portion of the market.

Changing Perspectives

By design, Cyrano is a system that is intended to defy narrow categories of use:

We really tried to create an open-ended method that people can use to create their own machine, not one that we predefined, and what we’re finding is that people are very creative. It amazes me how people use our device that I hadn’t really envisioned.

As evidence, Ray cites a system that allows a user with special needs to work effectively in her father’s dental practice. The office manager uses the camera in the device to record short video segments that visually demonstrate how to do tasks. The user watches them a number of times, and proceeds to complete the tasks programmed into the unit for the day, implicating substantial applicability for both education and supported employment. Another user with brain damage caused by stroke can finish utterances, but cannot start them. Ray explains,

What he did was to program it with about three hundred sentence ’starts.’ He uses the Cyrano to start the sentence and then he finishes it. He calls it priming the pump.

This circumstance leads to inherent difficulty in evaluating the product in an explicit manner for the market at large. Consumers need to see the fundamental flexibility of the device and make a logical jump in applying it for unique needs and lives. Part of the solution is OneWrite’s emphasis on testing and experimentation at the user end with a very liberal loan-to-buy program. If someone is actually making substantial progress, the company will allow them to keep the device in hand while it helps to arrange funding with insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid, or other options. OneWrite is aggressive in educating consumers about funding options.

On Communication

Despite Ray’s insistence on simplicity, he also believes in the power of a device that can multi-task for persons with disabilities, learning and working in a modern information-based society. He explains,

Communication is becoming a much broader topic. In the past it was just producing some kind of verbal utterance. I think now you’re also looking at things that come along with a machine like this as being central to everything from socialization to communication through alternate sources. Messaging is an example—as cell phones become more prevalent that run the windows mobile environment, we plan on using as much of that cell phone as we can. Further, if we can actually create calls that use synthesized voice over the phone, great… If we can use that same device to do GPS tracking, you could locate a person with brain injury or autism in real time. And my son can use it as an entertainment device, playing all his favorite movies right there on one device. It’s a whole group of other functions beyond just ‘communication.