Meet Eli, OrCam's Youngest User

Two years ago Dr. Yonatan Wexler, OrCam’s Senior VP of Research and Development, traveled to Seattle, Washington to deliver a new device to OrCam’s youngest user, seven-year-old Eli who is dealing with childhood blindness.

While we pride ourselves on hand-delivering each OrCam device to its new owner, this task isn’t usually handled by our vice presidents. But this situation was a special one.

Eli has been struggling with childhood blindness since his birth and by age seven was legally blind, unable to read print or recognize people’s faces. After spending years developing a device to help make life easier for people like Eli, Yonatan wanted to be the one to personally present the young boy with his new OrCam device and to show him how to use it.

Eli was delighted with his first experience with OrCam, and his enthusiasm at reading a print copy of Harry Potter on his own, left everyone present a little emotional.

We came back to visit Eli

Last month we returned for another visit with Eli, this time headed by Eliav Rodman, OrCam’s Director of Marketing. We’d all heard a lot about Eli from Yonatan and Eliav was looking forward to meeting Eli for himself, and to introduce him to OrCam’s new face recognition feature, which we were sure he would love. Eli was also going to receive an update to his device, which would make the reading and product recognition features work even better. And just to make the visit a little more fun, we brought along a small gift- the new Jurassic World book by David Lewman.

Eli was excited to dive into his new book with OrCam, and declared the experience to be “awesome!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRKKWwjqZdQ

Next, Eli learned how to use OrCam to identify faces and he quickly figured how to teach OrCam to recognize his mother.

Finally, we moved on to product recognition, where Eli successfully, but with muted enthusiasm, identified a box of Raisin Bran.

“And yet you never eat Raisin Bran,” Eli’s mother teased.

“I don’t like it,” he sheepishly admitted, handing the box of cereal back to his mother.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRLqLASviIg

The visit ended on a high note, with Eli announcing “I can’t wait to take OrCam to school and try the face recognition out on my friends.”

Thanks, Eli, for being such a great sport and letting us share your experience with our readers.

And here are a couple of pictures from our visit with Eli:

Eli uses OrCam to identify a box of Raisin Bran:

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