ATU786 – HapWare ALEYE with Jack Walters

Hello, this is Jack Walters and I am the CEO and co-founder at HapWare 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 786 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on June 19th, 2026. On today’s show, we’re super excited to welcome Jack Walters here to tell us about the HapWare ALEYE. We’re also joined by our friends from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning. Don’t forget, listeners, if you’re looking for a transcript of this show, go over to eastersealstech.com, find the show and a transcript will be available right there. Our transcripts are generously sponsored by InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. Now listeners, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners next up on the show, we’re very excited to welcome back Ale Gonzalez from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with Bridging Apps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Alarmy Loud Alarm Clock. Alarmy is an alarm clock app designed for heavy sleepers and anyone who struggles to get out of bed in the morning. Instead of simply tapping snooze, users can set missions like solving map problems, taking a photo, shaking the phone, or completing movement activities before the alarm will turn off. Our favorite features were the customizable wake-up challenges and loud alarm options that encourage users to physically and mentally engage before starting their day. The app can be especially helpful for individuals who benefit from extra structure, routine, or motivation in the morning. Alarmy is available for both Android and iOS devices and offers free access with optional premium features available. For more information on this app and others like it, visit www.bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, it may seem odd to discuss non-verbal communication on an audio-only podcast, but maybe that will help drive our point today home. Today, our guest is Jack Walters from HapWare and he’s here to tell us all about the HapWare ALEYE and how it can help with relaying non-verbal cues to individuals with disabilities and I, for one, am looking forward to learning more about it. Jack, welcome to the show.

Hello? Thank you for having me.

Yeah, I’m excited to get into talking about the technology, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yes. So, I am one of the co-founders and CEO at HapWare. I’ve been in pretty much disability tech my entire career, started off as an engineer and then now have been much more focused on how do you build great products for people with a range of disabilities? How do you deliver them in an equitable fashion? And how do you work with organizations across the disability ecosystem to ensure that all the stakeholders are in place and you’re making really great user experiences that make impact?

Oh, that’s awesome. I love that you’ve been doing it for a while in different kinds of capacity. So, I guess that brings us on to why we have you on today. Jack, what is the HapWare ALEYE?

Yes. So, ALEYE is a device that communicates all the different non-verbal and social cues. So, think about hand gestures, body language, facial expressions, sentiment. So, for people who are blind or low vision, it might be focused on knowing when someone’s reaching out to shake your hand, walking away, smiling, waving. For people that are on the neurodiverse spectrum, we hear things around sentiment analysis and social cues. Is this person happy, sad, engaged, upset? So, we communicate all those non-verbal cues through the sense of touch or haptics on a wrist-worn wearable. So, ALEYE is a wristband. It’s about the size of a big watch and it has embedded sensors in it, embedded haptic touch sensors. And it also pairs with smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans or Meta smart glasses or your Zoom call or your phone and it will pick up the video, the smart glasses.

The camera will pick up the visual feed, so those non-verbal cues. And then we’ll do our computer vision and machine learning to say, “Hey, what does this cue mean? What is someone showing an individual?” So, it’s definitely more on the advanced technology side of how do we determine what this non-verbal cue is? And then we translate that in real time to the sense of touch or haptics on the wrist and people are able to intuitively understand what that non-verbal cue is because of the sensory substitution and the technology methods that we’ve created to be able to communicate information super, super intuitively, meaning that when someone’s smiling at you, you might ask, “What does a smile or a happy face feel like if it’s touch on my wrist?” And really what it is we’ll draw almost like a smiling face on your wrist through the wristband so that you know, “Oh, this is a smiling face or this is someone that’s happy.” And same thing for all the different non-verbal cues, we’ll just draw them.

And we’ve seen this work in practice very, very well as people are able to learn across the disability ecosystem, but primarily blind, low vision and neurodiverse, able to learn seven non-verbal cues in less than five minutes-

Oh, wow.

… with full autonomy, very minimal need for third-party support in your social interactions when you’re out and about and just a greater accessibility when it comes to the communication needs that are critical for employment, for social and home and personal interactions and education.

Oh, definitely. And we’ll dig a little bit more into all those things, but Jack, I got to say, where did the idea for this come from?

That’s a good question. So, it started when my co-founder and I met. My co-founder and I met a couple of years ago at the Colorado School of Mines. It’s an engineering school and we met working on a research project together and Brian, who’s my co-founder, is part of the blind and low vision community, 100% blind, also experienced a traumatic brain injury and happens to be one of the unofficial statistic that some other people in the disability community have told us was that there’s 20 people in the world who are blind with a PhD in computer science and Brian’s one of those people. So, he’s very, very technical and knows obviously from lived experience, what certain pain points may be, but also knows how to build the solutions from scratch. So, we met on a research project and just hit it off on building haptics and building assistive technology.

So, we kind of always were building things together and he obviously had a lot of the lived experience and we wanted to talk to other people in the disability community because I think so often in the market is people just build something because they think that someone with a disability needs it, but they don’t have it from lived experience and from actual conversations and observations and bringing people into the design process. So, we were very diligent from the beginning of it should stem from lived experience. People with the disability should be the one building it, but also including them in the design process. So, we just were always doing that and we always had that process in mind. It was always, “How do we include people? How do we ensure that from the get go we’re building things that are important, valuable, and solving problems and we can deliver it in a way that makes the most sense for the different communities that we serve.”

Nice. Nice. Excellent. And on this show, I get to talk to a lot of amazing folks and it seems like the things that last and the things that thrive are the ones that start in that kind of way. Not just as an outsider, I see something I think is a need and I’m going to try to fix it, but actually including folks that it’s going to be able to assist and be able to overcome a barrier always seems to make not just something that lasts, but something that actually does meet a need.

I agree. Yeah. I mean, you hear about the nothing about us without us framework in this sort of community and our team’s background is very much so in the traditional, almost like tech world where it’s not like we’re a bunch of researchers or scientists. We have scientists and multiple PhDs on our team, but our team comes from almost like the startup Silicon Valley type of engineering world. And in that sort of vein, we’re used to iterating at super lightning fast speed and always be shipping and being really user experience obsessed.

And I think that obviously there’s a lot of good and bad things that come from the tech world, but I think with assistive technology and the rise of more innovative, whether it’s different AI enabled solutions and software and things that update and improve over time, bringing some of these principles to the disability community where innovation is challenging at times and it’s expensive at times and a single piece of technology can be so much money, I think that it goes a long way to have people that are thinking about it in a scalable way where it’s like iteration using the most up-to-date engineering and design philosophies and techniques so that you can really deliver value very, very quickly and be kind of user experience obsessed.

Yeah. And I like how you brought up the accessibility of affordability as well and being able to include that and kind of have that from the beginning is extremely important because if it’s the best thing that’s going to help me in the best way but I can’t afford it, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t kind of get me there. So, I love that you did bring that in. I want to bring us back to the device itself and everything. So, you said it can detect cues and we mentioned some of them. Just kind of give me a list maybe, and it doesn’t have to be fully encompassing, of all the different cues that it’s able to be relayed through ALEYE.

Yeah. I’ll just give you a handful.

Yeah.

So, we’ll break it up in expressions, body language and gestures. So, expressions, these are going to be your things like the smiles, frowns, is your jaw dropped or your eyebrows furrowed or raised or did you just roll your eyes at me? Gestures or things like if someone’s waving, do they have their thumbs up or down, handshake, fist bump, pointing left, pointing right. Most of these are for our blind and low vision audience. And then body language is like head nods and shakes, someone walking away, reaching out for a hug, has their arms crossed, shoulder shrug. And then the sentiments are really kind of like the more emotional states of someone is, are they happy? Are they sad? Are they upset? Are they engaged? Are they interested? And so, we communicate all those. But as we’ve mentioned and we’ve worked with multiple Easterseals and the same way that nothing about us without us is the framework that needs to be had when you’re building for people with disabilities.

You also need to realize that the disability community is nowhere near one size fits all, like quite the contrary actually. Maybe there’s similarities through disability groups, but people are different, their needs are different. And we realized that very, very quickly in our beta process when we were doing beta tests and studies and shipping units. And so, we give people the opportunity and the option to customize their experience. So, what do I mean by that? So we mentioned that there’s kind of two different user groups, you have blind, low vision, left blind, and then more of the neurodiverse and people can connect the ALEYE device, the wristband to their phone and has an app where it’s like the interface for the wristband similar to a watch has an interface or like Apple Watch does to your phone and you can select and deselect the different cues that you want.

So, say, “Hey, I’m going to work today.” And I work maybe a customer service job. I’m going to select the five cues, seven cues that are important to me in that customer service job. Or maybe I’m going to school, say, “Okay, I want to have my school cues when one of my classmates comes up to me, wants to give me a hug, when they look surprised, when their job drops, when they’re in their eyes roll,” or maybe it’s a job interview and your blind and low vision and you want to know when the interviewer nods their head in agreement, reaches out to shake your hand, crosses their arms. Or maybe you’re a parent and you have a teenager that wants to use the device and you say, “Hey, I think I know the cues that he or she maybe struggling with,” And you could select the cues yourselves then.

And you could say, “Hey, these are the cues I’m going to give them. They’re going to go to school. They’re going to hang out with one of their friends. They’re going on a date. I’m going to select and de-select the cues that they want for them.” And you can create these as different experiences and it can always be adapted in real time on the app with just a few presses of a button.

Nice.

And the goal of this was to be the device that gives the autonomy of social and environmental cues and interactions. So, people always ask, “Hey, is the haptics, is the tactile distracting?” And the answer is it allows people to give a passive interpretation of the cues. So, they have very minimal training and the analogy I give is, and this is not just because we work with people who are blind or low vision, it’s just how it works and it’s like a sighted vision analogy. So, maybe when you are sitting in an office and you look to the right and it says calendar on the wall or when you’re driving and it says speed limit 60 miles per hour or you look in front of you and the wall is white, you kind of just passively interpret that information. I look around me and I’m just passively analyzing and collecting information. “Oh, it’s this calendar,” or whatever. “I don’t try to receive that information. You just do it. Your eyes are just analyzing and collecting without this cognitive load or trying.

And that’s what the haptics give the users is this way to passively interpret the information where you can receive it, collect it and get it with not really any trying. So, what ends up happening is you’re able to get all these different haptics and just get the information in real time and that’s a big benefit. So, you get the customization, the adaptability, but you also get the autonomy, you don’t need third-party support and you can just make it so you get the things that you know are important to you.

No, that’s great. And you actually answered because my next question was going to be, can I turn off? I’m trying to think of all the visual cues. I feel like that would almost be too much on cognitive load to have everything completely relayed. So, I love that you can change it for the situation and what’s important for that situation because in just some of the examples you gave, the social cues I need during a job interview are not necessarily the exact same I need in a social setting, out with friends or on a date or something like that. But being able to really tailor it to the situation and the needs of the individual, that’s great. That’s great that I can turn those things on and off and be able to set it up for my day and for what I actually need.

Absolutely. Yeah. No, that is a key part of the experience that you can create just in any way you want. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. Jack, you probably have a ton of these, but can you tell me a story about someone’s experience kind of using the ALEYE maybe as you were kind of testing maybe something that surprised you or maybe just a story that kind of sticks with you?

Definitely. So, I’ll tell a story about one of our early users and customers. So, we had some prototypes built. It wasn’t the best looking design at this point, but it worked and we wanted to test it. So, like I said, we’re always shipping updates and product. So, we gave this to one of our early customers and this was an individual that was losing his sight more and more rapidly. So, had some vision, but in the last six to 12 months drastically, drastically decreased. And we met him in person and said, “Hey, here’s wearable,” kind of give him a rundown. We’re in there in person with him trying to get some feedback of what was he thinking and watching him. And then we ended up leaving and left the device with him because he was going to use it for a long period of time. You would usually let people use it for a couple of weeks or a month at a time to really get an understanding of when they use it, how often, why, where is it important?

And for him, he was using it a lot and actually work calls and Zoom calls and virtual meetings and so much of the work people do now is virtual. So, A, we learned that there’s a really good opportunity to make this accessible for remote calls. But what was really exciting for us is that what he shared with us after his testing experience of how it restored a once long-lost depth of communication. Those are his words, not mine, of how we restored communication. And that’s really the why behind it is being able to have these great transformations. And for him it was at work and how that could be an improvement, but it also opened up the ideas of how could we support other use cases of non-verbal communication?

So, we delivered the value that we wanted and then this individual said how impactful it was, but then we started building a virtual ALEYE essentially where we can integrate with a Zoom call with just a little extension so that you can say, “Hey, I now have a Zoom,” if you’re blind or low vision or neurodivergent and you want to know the cues someone’s showing you on a virtual meeting, we can communicate that to you now as well.

Nice. Nice. And I love how the use case just kind of comes out of the user. Kind of like you said at the beginning, really taking their input and putting that kind of at the heart of everything is really awesome. And Jack, in looking at everything, I saw that we not only have the device, but then also a subscription service. What all’s included with that?

Yeah, so the subscription is kind of what helps power the device. We have a model where it’s similar to, I guess like a Netflix or HBO Max or something like that. So, it’s what really keeps the device on and includes all the features so that you get continuous value, allows us to be able to afford to be able to host things in the cloud, make updates, get the self-improvement that has kind of been lacking. And a lot of assistive technology is there’s statistics out there of how a lot of assistive technology people may make a huge investment upfront of thousands of dollars and then within a year about three quarters of it is put on the shelf and not used again. And our belief is that part of that problem is that it doesn’t evolve with the user and with the person that’s using the device.

So, this gives us the opportunity for a very low continuous cost, like I said, similar to a Netflix subscription, that we can continuously be improving the device and evolving it and that it is always providing the value that is making your work or your school or your social interactions more accessible, more powerful and empowering people as well.

Nice. Nice. Well, and I know that’s also great because yeah, it’s not that I’m going to buy this amazing device that really helps me. And well, next year here’s version two and you got to buy version two and version one no longer works or it no longer works with the things that it is. So, being able to get those updates and continuous support can make a very huge difference. Jack, our listeners want to find out more about ALEYE, about all the great things that it can do. What’s a good way for them to do that?

Yes. So, we have a newsletter and social media. So, if you go to HapWare.com, H-A-P-W-A-R-E.com, you can join our newsletter or our wait list to just stay up to date. And then we also have a list of events that we’ll be attending throughout the rest of the year. So, trade shows, conferences, in person demos that they could see if we’re coming to their local area, they could come and check it out. They could also email us at info@hapware.com. Our website has a bunch of information on how to get in touch with us. And we also have pre-orders available for people that would be interested in using the device. And for that, it’s also on our website, hapware.com/preorder and you can get a order in for $359 and that will be shipped for the first 100 people at the end of this year and then the next 1,000 about in early 2027.

Nice. Very cool. We will put links to that all down in the show notes so that folks can easily get there, find out more, reach out and in pre-order if that’s what they’re looking to do. Well, Jack, thank you so much for coming on today for telling us about HapWare, about ALEYE and about all the great things it can really do to help with those non-verbal communication cues.

Of course. Yeah, thank you.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an 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 Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was 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, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, and 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.