ATU755 – Arcana Strum with Haim Kairy

Hi, this is Haim Kairy, and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Arcana Instruments. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 755 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on November 14th, 2025.

On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome Haim Kairy. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Arcana Instruments and is here to tell us all about the Strum, how this accessible musical instrument can open up a world of music to individuals with disabilities. We’re also joined by our friends with BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning. As always, listeners, thank you so much for giving us a listen today and let’s go ahead, get on with the show.

Listeners, I have told you many times on here about our other shows, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions or ATFAQ. These podcasts are available, well, wherever you got this podcast probably, but they’re also available on our website, which is eastersealstech.com. I wanted to take a moment just to tell you about some of the other great things that you can find over there at eastersealstech.com. Of course, you can find all of our podcasts, this one as well as the others, but you can also find a wealth of other knowledge and great assistive technology things. As you all know, INDATA is the TECH-ACT provider for the State of Indiana, but if you’re looking for your local TECH-ACT provider, well, you can find that there too.

You can go to eastersealstech.com/states or just find it from the dropdown menus. Podcasting are not the only thing that we do. You can also find tech tips. These come out every Monday and are a short video that will show you a piece of assistive technology, another adaptive device, or maybe a different way of using something in order to help individuals with disabilities and special needs. You can find out about our full day trainings. You can also sign up for them, attend, and even go back and look at the archives to find some of our old trainings and watch those at your leisure. You can find out about our different programs, including the Clinical Assistive Technology Program and all the amazing things that INDATA does.

If you’re here in the State of Indiana and you’d like to access any of our services, be that the library, the demonstration program, or the depot, all that information is located right there on eastersealstech.com. You’ll also find blog posts and just tons and tons of content all related to assistive technology. If you go to eastersealstech.com and click on this show, a full transcript will appear right below so that if you would like a transcript of this show or more information about it, you can always check that out on the website. I’m pretty sure I tell you this, folks, quite often, but if you ever have a question, a comment, someone you’d like to see for a guest or anything along those lines, please reach out to us.

You can reach us via email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Call our listener line at (317) 721-7124 or drop us a line on Twitter, @indataproject. You can also find ways to contact us through the website itself at eastersealstech.com while you’re checking that out. So, again, if you do enjoy this show and you’re looking for more information on assistive technology, you can always check out our sister podcasts wherever you get your podcasts, or you can also go to eastersealstech.com and check out everything there is to know about our program access, access our blog posts, our YouTube channel, our podcasts, and tons of other information related to assistive technology.

I thank you so much for listening. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show. Coming up next on the show, we welcome back BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Emergency: Severe Weather App. The Emergency: Severe Weather App by the American Red Cross is designed to keep you informed, prepared, and protected during severe weather. The app provides real-time weather alerts with simple explanations and it includes audio alerts and vibrations to make sure you get notified. It contains 35 different weather and emergency situations in its preparedness guides that walk you through what to do before, during, and after an emergency.

A favorite feature is that the app includes a toolkit complete with a device flashlight, a loud alarm, an instant I’m safe notification message capability, and access to the American Red Cross First Aid app. You can also customize alerts by location, whether it’s your home, a loved one’s address, or your current location. This is helpful if you rely on caregivers or family for transportation and need to track multiple areas. Emergency: Severe Weather App is currently available for both iOS and Android devices and is free to download. For more information on this app and others like it, visit www.bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, today, we are getting musical on Assistive Technology Update with our special guest, Haim Kairy from Arcana Instruments. He’s here to tell us about the Arcana Strum and how it can open up a world of accessible music to individuals and I, for one, am super excited to learn more. Haim, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I am really excited to get into this topic and talking about it, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I’m a musician. Well, I’m a drummer, so my musician friends don’t call me a musician. But yeah, I play drums. Since the invention of the undo option, I can create music and play music and I’m also a technologist, a developer. I had a great fortune with Arcana to fuse these two skills together.

That’s awesome. Why do drummers never get any respect? Because I swear if you’ve got a good drummer, you can tell, but man, if you’ve got a bad drummer, you can tell too.

That’s true.

Yeah, I think just once, get a little off beat for them and we’ll see if they don’t think the drummer’s important again. But anyway, we don’t need to talk about that. I guess let’s start off big picture, just talking about Arcana Instruments. What is the mission and why was it started?

So it actually started as a hackathon. So, about seven years ago, this 12-year-old girl, Gil, she came into our co-founder’s music school, music class. She came in with her motorized wheelchair and she has a cerebral palsy with very limited movements in her hands and fingers. The music teacher Boaz asked her, “Yup, how can I help you?” She said, “I want to learn to play guitar.” Her classmates at the time were starting to learn piano, guitar, flutes, and other instruments. He looked at her hands and fingers and his heart was broken, but he told her that she wouldn’t be able to play the guitar. Then she took out a flyer from her wheelchair that Boaz handed out before the school year for students to sign up to lessons. The flyer said, “Anyone can play, everyone can play.”

She said, “You said everyone can play, so teach me how to play.” Boaz, she saw that this girl is so motivated and talented and he thought he would just go into a music store and find an appropriate instrument that she can play, but all he found was very simplified toys and music instruments for infants, but not a real music instrument that Gil could control and learn to play. So, we started teaching her music theory and rhythm, playing percussions, but it wasn’t enough for her.

He saw that she’s getting frustrated with not being able to play, but he noticed that her control over her motorized wheelchair with a joystick and a few buttons, she’s totally independent and he thought, “Why don’t we create an instrument, a music instrument that she would be able to play based on these controls that she can actually use?” And that started a hackathon between a few friends and after a few months of creating a prototype instrument, Gil could actually really start to learn.

So, we created this prototype that one hand does strumming with a stick and the other hand selects chords. That was the basis of our first instrument. After a couple of months, Gil actually performed live with her classmates on stage in front of 200 parents and teachers and family members. That’s when we felt that we really got to make a change in the landscape of music instruments to enable people with disabilities to enjoy learning music and playing music just like as we took for granted as kids growing up.

Nice. I am so glad she called him out on saying, “Well, you said right here that anyone could and I’m anyone. So, what do you got?” So glad she called him out and it all came along and all into fruition to make music a little bit more accessible. I know that you talked a little bit about how you use the two hands and everything, but there’s also some other access methods to be able to use the Strum. What are some different ways that individuals can access it or some changes and things that they can use?

Yeah, so that’s a great question and that’s what drove us to create the first ever accessible music instrument. Gil has a twin sister also with cerebral palsy. When she tried to play Gil’s instrument, she couldn’t play it because her abilities are totally different from Gil. That led us to figure out a way to make the instrument adjustable and configurable for a lot of different disabilities and abilities. We set out for a one-year mission of research working with people ages from 5 to 95 with physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities, neurological symptoms, autism, Down syndrome, and trying to figure out what accessories and configurations we have to create to address all these kinds of abilities. So, the Arcana Strum has, for example, replaceable handles. So, it’s not just a regular stick.

There’s a handle with a throttle that is the width of a therapeutic tennis ball, and there’s handles like a joystick and handles like arcade stick handles with Velcro straps for people who can’t grasp the handle. The keyboard side, the keys, they pivot around to accommodate different hand positions, and to complement all these controllers, it can be set for different tensions and to accommodate different motor abilities. So, if someone can’t control the handle, we make it real soft and then you can strum it like a harp.

For people with involuntary movement, you can tighten up the controls and then the handle is more controllable and less frustrating to play exact strings. We also added a set of external accessories and the option to connect to standard assistive technology switches. So, people can play with their foot or with their head. Wherever there’s motion, we configure the instruments to enable them to make music, create music, and participate in music playing.

No, that’s great. I love that you let them connect maybe what they’re used to using, what they already use or like you said, what they can easily access to still be able to create music and participate and everything else. I was looking through everything. I saw you also offer lessons, tutorials, and some other assistance on the website and everything. Can you tell our listeners about these?

Yeah. So, when we created the instrument as musicians, we know that learning a new instrument for people who already, for example, for teachers who play guitar, learning a new instrument like the Arcana Strum and learning to play and learning to teach it, we didn’t want to create a learning curve for teachers. So, the entire instrument is based on guitar principles. So, chords, notes, riffs, scales. Music teachers and musicians within two or three minutes immediately understand the mechanics and the theory of the instrument and can take all their musical programs, musical content, and work with just regular guitar chords lessons and work with students just as they would work with students playing a guitar.

So, you can take all your content chords, music sheets, and work with the Arcana Strum. We also provided web services like free web apps for teachers and students to create sheet music based on Arcana, very simple sheet music with color coding and number coding to create just no sheet music for any song like chord symbols. So, teachers create these sheet music and share them with their student. This works online with no software installation or drivers needed. You just plug your Arcana Strum into your computer with a USB or with a Bluetooth and you can play while you’re seeing the sheet music that you’ve created or your teacher created for you.

Nice. I love that you thought about that step too. I know for some teachers, I mean especially music teachers, I can’t even imagine trying to teach kids music, but like you said, is there time? I already know guitar. Is there time to learn this new instrument well enough where I can teach a student who maybe hasn’t had access to music? So I like that you gave those resources. I mean not just to the individuals that are out there playing or want to expand and learn to play, but also to the teachers that are going to be teaching those students to use it. So, I’m glad you thought of that.

Yeah, that’s one of the feedbacks that we’ve heard during the research process of what’s out there for people with disabilities. We found that there’s many cool things like sensors and different solutions and apps, but teachers couldn’t integrate it into their regular music curriculum. So, it required more resources and time from teachers to create these new programs and learn instruments. That’s part of the reason why the instruments weren’t adopted by teachers in schools.

For sure. I’m going to ask you this and I’m sure your friends might tell me you’re a drummer, so maybe it’s not the best question to ask you, but I am going to ask you anyway. Why is music so important?

Well, that’s a great question. When we built the company after the prototype phase and we raised capital to turn it into a company, file patents, and do the business research, we really researched this not only from our gut feeling, but from academic studies and papers. So, first and foremost, music, it’s like a very internal language that everybody can relate to. So, even if you’re not a musician, sometimes you can whistle a song, hum a song, clap your hands, and it’s automatically doing something to your spirit. It lifts you up, it connects you to the world. But aside from that fun part or spiritual part of the music, there’s a neurological activity while you’re learning to play music that is essential for developing your brain, especially young children’s brains.

So, music, it involves reading, verbal, nonverbal communication, concentration, pattern recognition. All these kinds of things working together, they light up your neurons simultaneously and enable very essential brain development. That’s why music education is mandatory, for example, in every public school in the United States, like 90,000 public schools. You have to learn music for at least a year or two, even if you want to be a musician or not, because academic studies have found that people who have studied music and learned music for at least two years, their brain develops in a much wider capacity than people who never studied music. There’s also a social side, which is very important.

So, when you play music with a band and you’re more acceptable among your peers and your friends and your family, it raises your self-esteem. So, when I was young, I was a late bloomer and I was a small kid, but sitting behind the drums, it really empowered me and I really felt like bigger than I am physically and I was in a band. So, it really raised my self-esteem. So, I couldn’t imagine what I would be without music in my life. I think many musicians feel the same.

Yeah, I know at least the ones I’ve been able to talk to, it definitely do. Yeah, very, very well put. Please don’t take any offense to the drumming joke that was only from the comment that you’d made earlier. Because trust me, as someone, I love music, love listening to music, love concerts, love all different kinds, and have almost absolutely zero talent. So, I am just amazed by anyone that can play anything and being able to get your hands and feet moving in the way of drums is always an impressive thing definitely all the way around. Well, we heard the story of the inspiration behind the Arcana Strum, but could you tell us maybe another story or two about someone’s experience that maybe surprised you or just sticks with you?

Yeah, for sure. There’s so many, and I love it when people send over their testimonials, a mother saying that she came from work and she hears that someone’s practicing a guitar. It took her a few minutes to realize that it was her daughter playing the Arcana Strum and practicing at home, something that she didn’t even imagine that would happen. We have musicians that were injured in some… We have a musician that had a spinal injury during a work incident and he used to play guitar and he couldn’t play guitar after his injury, but with his Arcana Strum, he’s able to play guitar, write music.

I just got feedback from someone from Maryland who has… I think it’s called ALS, and he used to play guitar and no longer play guitar. His motor skills are declining by the week and he has an Arcana Strum. He wrote me a few weeks ago that he just had a jam with one of his friends playing the Arcana Strum. So, these kinds of stories really hit home and warm our hearts and keep our mission and focus to develop this instrument and even more instruments after that.

Yeah, we’re looking forward to seeing where it all goes. We definitely love, and you brought up a good point from the gentleman with ALS because it makes me think of other folks just as they get older and arthritis and things like that where it’s just not easy to maybe fiddle with the strings the way you did before, being able to have a different method to still be able to play, still be able to participate, still be able to do something that you love just in a little bit different way, but still be able to use that talent.

Yeah, we have many examples of that as well, elderly people taking the Strum and playing music because they cannot play their original instrument. We have people recovering from stroke that one hand cannot play as they used to. So, they do their chords with the foot and strum with their hands. So, many, many examples how the instrument is impacting people’s lives.

That is so cool. If our listeners want to find out more, what’s a good way for them to do that?

We have a YouTube channel and an Instagram, Arcana Instruments, and you can get those links in our website, arcanainstruments.com.

We will put all that information down in the show notes so that folks can go and easily find it and check everything out for themselves. I definitely recommend listeners that you do. It is very cool. Haim, I think you did a great job of describing everything, but I think until you can go and check out the videos and everything and really see how it’s used, t’s really cool just how accessible it is and all the different ways that you’re able to access it.

So, Haim, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about the Arcana Strum, just how everything got started and where it’s going. We’re excited to see where it goes in the future and can’t wait until one day maybe we’re having you on here with an entire band full of accessible instruments, but we really do like the Strum and very cool. I definitely say go check it out, and thanks again for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on assistive technology update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter, @indataproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule.

Today’s show is produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project Easterseals Crossroads or supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.