[lostdog]

I would love to hear pg's analysis of the business case for this company.

By my math, 5k people in the US are diagnosed per year, and if your keyboard costs $1k, then your ARR is $5m, and maybe the company valuation is $50m. Numerically, this is pretty far from the goal of a typical YC company.

I hate to be so cold-hearted about the calculations, but I've had a few friends get really passionate about assistive tech, and then get crushed by the financial realities. Just from the comments, you can see how many startups went either the military route or got acquired into VR programs.

The worst I've seen, btw, is trying to build a better powered wheelchair. All the tech is out there to make powered wheelchairs less bulky and more functional, but the costs of getting it approved for health insurance to pay the price, combined with any possible risk of them falling over, combined with the tiny market you are addressing makes it nearly impossible to develop and ship an improvement. I do hope that we reach a tipping point in the near future where a new wheelchair makes sense to build, because something more nimble would be a big improvement to people's lives.

[musesum]

ALS is a configuration. Blindness is a configuration. Conventional UIs are built for a different configuration. Accesible UI usually overloads the conventional. If you start from scatch, sometimes you find something new. If you're lucky, the new thing scales to other configurations.

For example, I wrote a NLP parser for a calendar app, at Tempo.AI. It was much more efficient than the visual interface. And thus, it was accessible. But, it didn't use the accessible idiom. Instead, it was universally more efficient, whether you are blind or not.

A good example is a wheelchair accessible doorway. One method is to have a button at wheelchair height. The other method is to have the door open with an electronic eye. The first is Accessible. The second is Universal. Doesn't matter if you are in a wheelchair or not. It's a throughput multiplier.

[enumjorge]

Another use case that I've seen talked about when it comes to eye-tracking technology is as it relates to the ad industry (it's always the freakin ad industry...). Eye-tracking is another way to detect what you're paying attention to. Currently, a lot of the ad business depends on measuring impressions, but they do so with heuristics. Eye-tracking can actually tell you if a user is looking at something vs pretending they do.

[ImPostingOnHN]

this is undoubtedly a direction Facebook is going with Oculus' eye tracking VR headset: serve arbitrary ads or other content, record subconscious saccades, build psychographic profile of unknowing and unwilling victim

[anymouse123456]

Also post-covid, it's incredibly difficult to convince a domestic CM to assemble a couple hundred devices per year.

[mhb]

Before hearing the business case, it would be good to know what is already available and has been found wanting. There seem to be a lot of people saying that they have working systems of some kind.

[TheHappyOddish]

You know the US is a tiny percentage of the worlds population, right? There's a much larger market out there.

[drexlspivey]

Apple Vision uses eye tracking for the primary user input, it’s not only restricted to people with ALS

[sokoloff]

I have absolutely no idea of the state of play of eye-based input devices, but I wouldn't expect an entire eye-input keyboard system to be anywhere near as cheap as $1K, but rather a figure 20-100x that.

[anymouse123456]

They're currently in the $1,000-$3,000 range.

[eoerl]

We (The Eye Tribe folks) sold one at 99$ years ago. 1k-3k is mostly lack of competition I believe.