The low vision industry is built around a user-first ethos: everyone working in the field wants to find solutions that will improve the lives of vulnerable people. Nonetheless, it remains competitive and poorly funded, so it can feel like the risks outweigh the rewards for entrepreneurs. Maël Fabien, co-founder and CEO of biped, spoke to us about balancing these conflicting demands and working with blind people to create a viable solution that is truly built for them.

Where did the idea for biped come from?

The idea for the company was actually born from a chance encounter. During my PhD at EPFL, I was out on a walk through Lausanne city centre and I came across a visually impaired person holding a cane and FaceTiming a friend – in the absence of other aids, the friend was trying to direct the caller to their destination. I chatted with them for a while and it got me thinking about whether I could build something better, maybe something AI-powered, which would allow a blind person to move around independently.

What aids are currently available for visually impaired people?

The most common solution you’ll find on the market is the standard white cane. It’s easy to produce and obtain, plus it gives users a fair bit of haptic feedback about the ground around them. Proficient cane users can tell whether they’re walking on concrete or grass and when they’re about to step out onto the kerb. Nevertheless, the cane only detects basic floor-level elements: it offers no protection for the user’s upper body and no assistance in terms of detailed directions – they need to know the route themselves or have something or someone else helping them.

Then, you have guide dogs: they’re one of the most advanced mobility aids on the market, but once again, they don’t have a built-in GPS. And above all, they’re incredibly expensive to train – it costs over CHF 50,000 to train one dog. This means that in the UK, for example, only around 200 new guide dogs are trained every year, even though there are over 5,000 people on the waiting list for one. So you see the maths doesn’t quite work.

How does biped’s technology complement or surpass these existing aids?

We’re not necessarily aiming to replace other aids; rather, we’re leveraging technology to complement cane use, as well as help those waiting for dogs. After all, we’re dealing with a community of users who, without aids, can lose a good degree of their autonomy. So, leveraging the principles of self-driving cars, which use cameras to navigate autonomously, we’ve developed a harness that works in a similar fashion. It includes three cameras that have a 170-degree field of view, a small computer with embedded AI and a speaker that provides the user with continuous audio feedback – this states the directions, as well as beeping or clicking if there’s a risk of collision. It’s basically like having someone on FaceTime to tell you about your surroundings, but you’re still operating independently.

How did you involve end users when developing your technology? What did you learn about the challenges they currently face?

Entering the blind community has proved challenging at times. In this space, products are usually developed by people who have firsthand experience with the challenges that blindness presents. The classical university spin-off is usually not well perceived in this field – so it was crucial for us to build our technology with users from day one.

We’ve worked with blind people all the way through the process, from ideation to launch. When we were just starting out, it was important to us that we not only consulted market experts and business owners in this space, but also attended appointments at ophthalmic hospitals to understand exactly what blind patients are up against. Then, we collaborated extremely closely with a focus group of beta testers, who were willing to give us their time and transparent feedback to help us iterate our product.

As things stand, we’ve built eight versions of our harness NOA. And thanks to a combination of user feedback and technological breakthroughs, I can confidently say we’ve built one of the very best mobility devices in the world to date. It answers pretty much all user needs: our harness is the only one of its kind that works at night and that can detect holes, drop-offs, stairs and so on, with the largest field of view for obstacle detection. It thereby allows users to operate independently in pretty much any context and at any time of day or night. But that obviously comes with a price – which is where we run into issues again.

Tell us more about pricing: what are the challenges and how are you addressing them?

The main problem we’re facing is related to cost and reimbursement: the price tag of the product becomes a massive part of the equation in a field where funding is not widely available.

To put it plainly, the lack of budget allocation for disabilities is scandalous. Funding for disabled people is being eroded all over the world. Notably, in the Paris region, they just got rid of about half their available funding, because when budget cuts need to be made, funding for disabilities goes first.

The same principles apply in Switzerland, where there’s really no excuse for it. A lot, if not all, of the Swiss cantons would have the financial means to provide a robust disability policy, but the way the insurance is set up means that they will fight reimbursement for disability aids at every step of the way. If it were on a medical basis, that would be fair enough. However, it feels like most reimbursement requests are not accepted due to pricing issues – which feels incredibly infuriating when we see users benefitting from our device and low vision experts supporting us.

I can only really talk from the manufacturer’s standpoint, and there’s only so much we can do. We’re already operating at low margins. But I feel so frustrated by the system and concerned about the patients it affects. I’ve got to know so many amazing people who live with disabilities since starting biped, and so I now understand the pressure they’re under. In Switzerland, aside from some basic subsidies and grants, disabled people receive very little income – and if you’re over 65, you can forget about that too, because you’re not under disability insurance anymore, even though age is the biggest risk factor for disability. Older disabled people basically have to rely on their own means. That’s why you find a lot of them learning to get by with a standard iPhone which costs CHF 400, even though, in the case of blind people, there are super advanced braille computers – but they cost CHF 20,000 and many can’t afford this upfront cost. It’s heartbreaking.

You collaborated with Transports Lausannois and Urbagestion on a pioneering initiative last year: a visually impaired person used your harness to navigate their way to Biopôle on the metro. Can you tell us more about this achievement, what it means for biped and what it means for visually impaired people?

We wanted to workshop the specific real-life scenario of someone living in the centre of Lausanne who needed to travel to offices based at Biopôle using public transport. To do so, they obviously take the metro, but there’s a lot more to the journey than that: they also need to leave the metro station, walk across the campus, find the entrance of the building they need, navigate to the lift and then go up to a specific floor and office door. These are what we call ‘last mile challenges’, which are often not considered when mapping out public transport journeys for blind people.

So, we developed a solution that is synced with the metro timetables and that can also operate without signal underground, enabling a totally independent journey. The really positive thing that we learned through this project with Transports Lausannois is that the initiative is ultra scalable: not only could we deploy our technology on other metro lines or bus routes in Lausanne, but we could roll it out to pretty much any other public transport office in the world – Zurich, Paris, you name it. I feel like we could massively improve accessibility on public transport – and other types of infrastructure – across the world.

What’s next for biped – what are your priorities moving forward?

 I think we’ve really nailed the technology now, so it’s a distribution game moving forwards. Above all, if we are to push this further, we really need to sort out the reimbursement issue: until we can find a way to make our product accessible and affordable through health insurance, we’re fighting an uphill battle.

Ultimately, I’m on the users’ side: I completely agree they shouldn’t be forced to fund the device themselves – that’s like double punishment for being blind. But at the moment, I’m fighting for them against the system – and we’ll see who wins!