In the last few years, there have been a myriad of products created to cater to the needs of the blind and visually impaired. From IrisVision’s assistive VR headset to Google Maps’ enhanced audio guide, companies have leveraged technology to help people with low vision live a more functional and independent life. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the leading causes of vision impairment are refractive errors, cataract, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration, clearly showing that there is a massive spectrum between 20/20 vision and total blindness. This is the population segment that ReBokeh is targeting.
Re-Clarifying The World
“Bokeh is a photography term and it’s those balls of light you get in the background of an image when the background is out of focus,” ReBokeh founder and CEO Rebecca Rosenberg told me in a Zoom call. “So ReBokeh is meant to be a re-clarifying of what is out of focus.”
Based in Baltimore, MD, the startup has developed a smartphone app that allows users to adjust the appearance of the world around them according to their specific vision needs. The app leverages the real-time camera feed from the smartphone or tablet and allows users to overlay customized filters to adjust things like contrast, colour hue, zoom and lighting. Real life situations where this comes in handy include watching a live sports game, reading a menu, navigating a train station or playing cards.
The idea for ReBokeh stems from Rosenberg’s own lived experience with visual impairment as she was born with a rare genetic condition called albinism — whereby the body doesn’t produce enough melanin, which in turn causes both developmental and maintenance challenges for the vision. Because of the lack of pigmentation, the eyes are unable to filter light properly, causing a degradation in visual acuity.
“If a person with normal vision sees in high definition, I see in standard definition,” Rosenberg explained. “There’s just not as many pixels and I’m just not getting as much visual information.”
Modern Assistive Technology
The 25-year-old entrepreneur founded ReBokeh in 2019 at Bucknell University, where she studied Biomedical Engineering. The app was partially inspired by the RUBY magnifier, which Rosenberg used to see things more clearly. “I remember thinking at that time: the iPhone has a higher resolution camera and screen, while the RUBY is difficult and confusing to use,” she said. “So why is it so much more expensive? Why can’t I just use my phone?’”
In addition to leveraging the iPhone’s camera and screen, Rosenberg was determined to create a modern assistive device. “What I found growing up is that all of the assistive technologies that were available to me were really designed to entirely replace vision,” she added. “Things like audio, text-to-speech, braille. But I have a lot of good, functional vision that I want to be able to use.”
She has a point. As a society, we’re so intent on “fixing” or curing people with disabilities that we often forget how life-changing low tech innovations can be. While ReBokeh isn’t one of those flashy, high-tech hardware devices that you see at CES, it allows millions of people with low moderate vision to see the world around them more clearly, without having to constantly ask for assistance.
Millions With Low Vision
Rosenberg has spent the past few years trying to determine how big of a market she was targeting and got to an estimate of 25 million people (U.S. only) who despite being visually impaired, still have some usable and functional vision. Add to that people over 50 and an ageing population on the rise and the market suddenly doesn’t look so niche. In 2021, ReBokeh launched a beta version to gather feedback from the low vision community and iterate on product features.
“We recognized at that point that what we had developed was only a little bit better than what was already out there,” Rosenberg told me. ”The user interface (UI) was a lot better, it was easier to use, but in terms of functionality, we were only incorporating a few additional features than what other products were offering. And so we realized pretty quickly that we had to improve over existing options on both fronts — performance and UI — to address the gaping hole in the market.”
The app has been live and public for a little over a year now, and while ReBokeh declined to share the current number of users, it says that there are active users in 96 countries and more than 175,000 vision adjustments made so far.
This week, the startup is launching a paid version called ReBokeh Plus, which provides updated features and a redesigned interface. New features include expanded inversion options like grayscale, inverted grayscale, yellow/black and yellow/blue filters; the ability to upload images to ReBokeh and then make adjustments to those images; and the ability to save adjusted images from the app directly to the camera roll for easy future access (a feature that was apparently highly requested by current users). ReBokeh Plus costs $2.99 per month or $28 per year.
Educating Investors
Funding-wise, ReBokeh has secured an initial $500k for its pre-seed round to keep growing. When asked how her experience with fundraising has been so far, Rosenberg says that the most challenging part is educating investors on the market segment of the moderate low vision population. “The concept of vision impairment not being the black and white of totally blind versus fully sighted was just new to them, and it usually takes me some time to get through that education,” she said.
In the pitch deck, Rosenberg included a slide with a picture of her as a kid with her face glued to her homework. She explains that she isn’t wearing any glasses because the type of impairment she has is not correctable. “While other founders state that they have 10+ years of experience in cybersecurity or AI, I can confidently say that I have 25 years of experience living with this problem every single day of my life.”
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