ATU618 – Puck with Barnabas Helmy

Hi, my name is Barnabas Helmy. I’m the inventor of PUCK, the Bluetooth to infrared remote, 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 618 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on March 31st, 2023. Today’s show, we are very excited to welcome back Barnabas Helmy, inventor of PUCK. We’ve got a blast from the past as we continue a little bit of our tribute to our former host, Wade Wingler, and we’ve also got Bridging Apps on with an app worth mentioning. Let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Maybe you’re looking for some new podcast to listen to, well make sure to check out our sister podcast, Accessibility Minute and ATFAQ or Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. If you’re super busy and don’t have time to listen to a full podcast, be sure to check out Accessibility Minute, our one-minute long podcast that gives you just a little taste of something assistive technology based so that you’re able to get your assistive technology fix without taking up the whole day. Part of the show is Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, or ATFAQ. On Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, Brian Norton leads our panel of experts, including myself, Velva Smith, and our own Tracy Castillo as we try to answer your assistive technology questions.

This show does rely on you, so we’re always looking for new questions, comments, or even your answers on assistive technology questions. So remember, if you’re looking for more Assistive Technology podcast to check out, you can check out our sister shows Accessibility Minute and ATFAQ, wherever you get your podcasts now, including Spotify and Amazon Music.

Listeners, I’d like to invite you all to our Web Accessibility Webinar for Developers on May 10th, 2023. Renowned web accessibility professional, Dennis Limbrie covers an array of topics for developing accessible websites. The training begins with disability and assistive technology basics and an overview of guidelines and laws. Main topics include content structure, images, forms, tables, video, CSS and ARIA. Techniques on writing for accessibility and testing for accessibility are also covered. If you’re interested in registering for this free training on Web Accessibility for Developers, please click on the link down in the show notes or visit eastersealstech.com.

Listeners, as I let you know, last week, Wade Wingler has moved on to a new organization and I’m sure he is going to do great things over there, but I thought just for fun, let’s take a little trip to the past. Coming up here in just a moment, we will actually play the first two episodes of Assistive Technology Update. Now you’re going to notice some major differences, not just in the voice, but in the whole premise of the show. The music is different, the stories are different. There’s no interviews. It’s just some very quick information. In fact, it much more closely resembles our other show, Accessibility Minute. These two shows actually came out on June 2nd and June 10th, 2011, and talk about some great things like how to turn your iPad into an iPhone, the accessibility settings of Mac OS 10 Lion, the introduction of Google Wallet and some other things.

With technology it’s always kind of fun to go down that rabbit hole of nostalgia and just hearing when things come out and really seeing how far we have come in technology, but also seeing how some of these tools are still used and really kind of open the door for other technologies that we’re still talking about on here today.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our show next week where we have a replay of Episode 378. That was the show where I first got my chops at hosting and Wade was my guest, but we’ll replay that as the last in our little series bidding Wade farewell and bidding him Good luck as he starts on his new adventure. Take it away, Wade.

Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in Indiana, and this is 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 people with disabilities and special needs.

First off, have you ever wished that your iPhone had a larger screen, larger buttons, or other large print features for low vision? Well, iPad, Islam is planning to release a new application designed to convert your iPad into an iPhone. This app is reported to allow you to make voice calls, FaceTime calls, SMS messages and more. Although a jailbreak is required, this may prove to be a very promising telephony tool for people who are visually impaired.

Ever wish you didn’t have to physically handle credit cards? Google has just announced a new service called Google Wallet that’s going to take advantage of near field communications technology. That means that you’ll be able to pay for your gas, your groceries, and gadgets with your cell phone. For some people with physical challenges, this may open up a new way to independently pay for everyday goods and services. Speaking of money, did you ever wonder how people with limited vision can tell a $1 bill from a $5 bill or a $10 bill without sighted assistance? Well, there’s a new iPhone application from the Look Tell Group that does just that. For $1.99, you can download the Money Reader application that will quickly and accurately tell you if you’re holding a $1 bill or a 20. According to Look Tell, this is just the first product in their plans. Imagine an application that you could use at the food court at the mall to determine the location of a Starbucks, a Burger King or a Taco Bell? Object Recognition is an up and coming technology and we look forward to more developments in this area.

Want more? Find links to all this great new technology and check out our blog at eastersealstech.com or follow us on Twitter at INDATA Project. Until next time, this has been your Assistive Technology Update.

Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in Indiana, and this is 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 people with disabilities and special needs.

First off, this week Apple announced a number of new products including an upcoming release of the new iPhone operating system, the new iCloud storage system for music, documents and photos, and the new version of the Macintosh OS10 Operating System, Lion. Included in the over 250 new features, Lion has a number of accessibility improvements. These include a number of new international voices for the voiceover screen reader, customizable preferences that will allow voiceover to use different speech settings for different computing tasks. Picture in a picture zoom, CRISPR cursors for new users with low vision and a new drag and drop feature designed to improve the ability to move items around on the screen. Watch for other new accessibility tools from Apple in an upcoming episode.

Did you ever realize how much music and sound effects add to the movie going experience? Sometimes the subtleties of music and sound effects are lost for movie goers who rely on captioning. A new service called Enhanced Captioning is attempting to convey this underlying content by using a visualization at the bottom of the screen for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. On the project’s website, the trailer for the popular movie Inception is enhanced with this new technology that conveys the impact and eeriness that was intended by the filmmakers. Visit our website for a link to check out this exciting new technology for yourself.

Lastly, ICOM has developed a new eye tracking system for use by individuals with significant mobility impairments. The EC7T system is a wearable device that looks like a pair of glasses equipped with infrared sensors to detect and track the user’s pupil. Traditionally, many eye tracking systems were mounted on the computer system. This new wearable system reduces the difficulties related to positioning the eye tracking system and allows users to more easily use eye movements to send an email, browse the web or play computer games.

Want more? Find links to all this great new technology, and check out our blog at eastersealstech.com or follow us on Twitter at INDATA Project. Until next time, this has been your Assistive Technology Update.

Listeners, next up on the show, we’re happy to welcome back Amy Berry from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning. Take it away, Amy.

This is Amy Berry with Bridging Apps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Tile. Tile is both an app and a line of small Bluetooth tracker devices. You purchase any number of these devices from Tile and then register them to the app. Once registered, put a tile anywhere and you can use the app to locate it as long as it’s in Bluetooth range. The tiles are small enough that they can be put on pretty much just about anything. So you may want to use them to help you find things like your wallet, keys, coat, purse, white cane, laptop, or anything else you want to keep track of. The app can show you the last known location on a map and/or make the device play a loud beeping sound to help you locate it. You can also press the button on a tile twice quickly to make your phone ring, which can be very helpful as well.

Tile is a great product for anyone who wants to keep track of items. For someone who is blind and/or low vision, it’s even more useful due to the ability to make items play a very distinctive sound for as long as it takes to locate them. Once you experience it for yourself, you’ll agree these are very helpful in your daily life. Best of all, the trackers themselves are not very expensive and replaceable batteries in most of them means you only have to buy new batteries every year or so rather than a completely new product. Tile is currently available for iOS and Android devices and it’s free to download with optional in app purchases. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Listeners back on Valentine’s Day of 2020, a time before mandatory shutdowns and all the other fun stuff of 2020. We had an interview with Barnabas Helmy. He was the inventor of the PUCK. Well, we ran into him at ATIA this past month and we’re really excited to have him back on the show and find out what all’s been going on with him and with PUCK.

Barnabas, welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I am excited to get into talking about everything, but considering it’s been quite a while and folks may not remember the last interview since that was, again, before everything went weird there for a little while, but as we get back to normal, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background?

Certainly. So I’m a jack of all trades really, trained in engineering and in the arts, and I just like to tinker around with things. Years ago, it seems like now, about eight years ago, I invented the PUCK, which is a Bluetooth, low energy to infrared remote. It basically turns your phone into a remote for all your infrared appliances. Originally developed it for myself to keep my daughter from stealing the remote when she was a little kid, but it grew into a bigger product than I expected. And then branching off from the consumer electronics industry, it started being adopted as adaptive technology for people unable to use physical remotes. So the last several years has been spent working on the next version specifically for the AT community.

Awesome. And before we get into talking about the newest version, when and how did you figure out that this could be an assistive device? Because I love that that wasn’t the idea originally, but then it started to move into that. Can you explain how that happened?

Well, it was actually serendipitous. At the time we were working with Walmart, trying to figure out how we could make those numbers work and beating my head against a wall. At that time, I was getting a lot of orders from a big spinal cord injury rehabilitation center, and I ended up reaching out to them and asking them, “Why do you keep ordering these in batches?” And it was a wonderful conversation with the OTs there, and it was actually discovered, I have to give all the credit to occupational therapists and speech language pathologists because they were the ones that actually discovered its use for people unable to use physical remotes. So that’s how it got discovered.

Isn’t that just great. Yeah, that again, you made something to do one need and somebody else just takes it and runs with it in a whole other direction, but still using it what it was made for, so that’s really awesome. Well, you got a new version of the PUCK here and coming out. Can you tell us all about it? I guess just start with just what all can it do?

Well, the difference from the original, so the original PUCK had an internal 2032, like a coin cell battery, and it would run for about six months on that. And the idea is you place it on or near something that’s controlled with an infrared remote, download our app, connect to it, and you’re off and running. Your phone becomes the remote.

One of the issues with the AT community was if you need to change the batteries, which you will need to do every so often, it can be challenging. You have to have dexterity to be able to do that. And then our app as well was not super accessible, so for switch control and voice control and other accessibility features. So since I talked to you last, this newest version contains an internal battery that’s recharged through USBC port, and it also has a push button, power on, power off feature on it. So that dexterity issue is no longer there.

Nice.

What’s also cool about this one is, if it’s in say a hospital or at your home on a television, you can mount this to the television and plug it into the USB port on the back, so you actually don’t even need to worry about the battery ever again. So it can either run off the battery when the power’s off to the television, the USB port’s off, and then listen, and then whenever it turns on, it just trickle charges itself and runs off that direct power.

Oh, that’s super cool. And yeah, that’s great. Now I have to ask, just because I know that it ended up becoming an assistive device by talking to other folks. Were these suggestions that were made by the community as well?

Absolutely, yeah. Working with the occupational therapists directly was, and then my customers always give me great feedback, and there’s a laundry list of updates that people would like, but these were the most pertinent and we continue to work on it and evolve the product to better suit their needs.

Awesome. As we talk about infrared, everybody knows what Bluetooth is, everybody knows what wifi is, everybody hears these, but people don’t think about infrared as much, and the TV of course is the big one, but what other things can be controlled by these remotes and therefore, by PUCK?

Well, this is a great question. I have a pre, I guess, PUCK med and discovering it with the rehab center, I would have interesting calls with customers, and one of them in particular had called me and he was a veteran who was missing his hands and he said, “I use this device to control my split AC unit. I use it to control my Roomba vacuum and a couple televisions.” And it was like, “Wow, okay.” These are things that I originally didn’t think of because my use case at home was to control the soundbar, the Apple TV and the television, all with a single PUCK.

So we get code requests from folks if it’s not in our library, which is huge, of things like aquarium lights or an old skylight that somebody has an infrared remote for that they use it. So a lot of space heaters is one. We’ve got some remotes coming to me to record right now for outdoor space heaters. So yeah, really just anything you can think of with a IR remote, we try and make it compatible with that.

Very cool. Very cool. And you mentioned controlling different things with a single PUCK, how many different devices can I connect through one single PUCK device?

Well, so if you think of it like a remote without buttons, as long as the PUCK itself is line of sight with the device that you’d like to control, the television or the space heater, it can control any number. And we’ve increased the infrared to about 35 feet as opposed to 5 feet from the earlier version. So it makes it much easier to control multiple products within that range. And then it talks Bluetooth to the phone, so there’s no line of sight issues with your phone. So when you’re actually controlling the device, you can be anywhere in the home.

Awesome. Well, and 5 feet to 35 feet, that’s a huge jump, so that’s really awesome.

That’s the bigger battery. The bigger battery allowed us to push more juice to the infrared and make it a lot more friendly to use.

Very cool. Tell me a little bit about the user interface on the phone. I know that you’ve been able to make it a little bit more accessible, but what is the user experience or what does the app or the user interface look like, I suppose? I know it’s hard to describe on a podcast, but…

So the original version, which is still the Android version, and we’re working on major updates to that, but the original version, contained basically a simple remote interface, looked like a remote. One of the things I learned with switch control and thing, it didn’t follow a grid very well, so it was a little confusing to use. And then also there’s a tray that you can tap and then it brings up all of the remote commands available to your product.

We had a lot of requests for putting those other commands into the simple remote interface. So with the iOS app, we reworked it so that the main screen of the remote is fully customizable. You can drag and drop any command to that front screen to make it very simple to access the most used commands. And when you download the app, it walks you through pretty easily. As soon as you download the app, it says Get PUCK or Connect to PUCK. And if you already have a PUCK, you just connect to it and it will walk you through. Like, Do you have a Samsung TV? And at that point it’ll download the codes to your phone and then you’re off and running.

Nice. And I love the way that you actually let them really customize it. Because I know a switch control, especially as you said with grids, it can be really frustrating if I’ve got 50 things on there that I’m trying to get through to get to number 50 or anything like that. I know you said it works with switch control. Does it also work with voice control, voiceover? Is it able to be used by those accessibility settings in the phones?

Yes. And we’ve improved the voice control navigation working with OTs who had pointed out different issues with the way it was originally. So we’re constantly trying to improve that. But yeah, it works natively with those. And we’ve also, one of the other things that we did was remove all of the images and replace with system level called Vector Format Graphics, but things that are accessible so we don’t have to worry about whether things are tagged with alt tags and whatnot.

And all those kind of things. That’s great. That’s really great. And oh, it’s come so far. I went back in preparation for this and listened to our old interview because that is quite a while. And again, a lot of stuff happened between then and now. And I love all the advancements and everything that has really been able to come through and all the feedback you’ve taken to really make it a very, very accessible device.

And I’m sure with all that feedback, you’ve probably heard a couple of stories of folks maybe using it in a different way or where it’s made a big difference for them. Can you share any of those stories with our listeners?

I think the most profound story was when I first started learning of how it was being used with people. I think the most profound case was a client who had a high level spinal cord injury and he used a sip and puff straw to control the television in his hospital room. When he would blow on the straw, it would turn the TV on or off, and when he’d suck on it would change the channel. And that was the limit of the controls because that’s what they could fit in the servo into the hospital bed remote.

When they had switched out the bed to a more modern bed, the hospital bed remote had become much thinner and they were unable to put the servo inside there. So he lost that ability to control the television. When they discovered PUCK, they were able to set up an iPad and use Eyegaze, and this customer was then able to use his eyes and a bite switch to have full control over his television. So he went from losing that freedom to having full control, not just power on, power off and channel up, but anything that the television can do, he was able to control with his eyes and his mouth.

That is so cool. And before all of this, did you have any idea what a sip puff or a bite switch or any of these things even were?

Absolutely no idea. I’d never seen them. It’s just been an amazing learning experience for me.

That is so cool. So cool. Well, Barnabas, I know you’ve got the new version out and everything else, but what does the future hold?

Well, right now we’re working with several partners. In the near term, working on an API so that other folks can connect to PUCK and use it with their interfaces. That’s been a big request of ours. So you should start seeing that pop up with some of the more popular AT devices out there, being able to connect directly to PUCK so you don’t have to switch interfaces.

And then the other ones we’re working on is the Android version of being able to use Web Bluetooth through Chrome. And this is really exciting. Instead of using the Android app, of using JavaScript in a web portal because Chrome allows it to connect directly to PUCK. So the concept is you’d be able to use it cross-platform on your MacBook, your Windows machine or on a Chrome browser or on an Android device through the Chrome browser. And then once it’s set up, being able to just scan a QR code for the next person that wants to use it if they want to pop up a remote. So those are some of the near term things we’re working on.

That is super cool and we can’t wait to see all those and everything else. If our listeners want to find out more or get a PUCK for themselves, what’s the best way for them to do that?

You can go to getpuck.com and we sell all versions on there or on amazon.com.

Excellent. And just because you brought it up, what’s the difference between the different versions?

So the PUCK Med is really a B2B version of it. It comes with a few more peripherals and the PUCK Pro is meant for the general consumer population. Yeah, PUCK Med, it comes with a mounting kit for the back of the television and a few more mounting supplies for that. And it also comes with a little, basically it’s a light pipe so you can mount it to the back of the television and not see the PUCK. So those are the differences, but otherwise the hardware inside of them is the same on the PUCK, different firmware.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, we’ll put a link to that over in the show notes so our listeners can easily find it. Well, Barnabas, thank you so much for coming back on the show and telling us just the leaps and bounds that PUCKs made over the last few years, and I love that you’re really just taking the input from the users, from the OTs and from the folks out there that are really using it and taking that and just making an even more accessible device.

Thank you. Well, the whole goal of this is to make a product that works for everyone, and that’s really what I’m after with it.

Awesome. Well thank you again.

Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.

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 at INDATA Project. 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 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.