Making Reading Real: Survey Data, 2022

What is the problem I am solving? How would you feel if, while reading this text, letters and words started merging or disappearing, making your reading impossible, and you knew there was nothing you could do to recover your reading ability? Frightening. Devastating. That is precisely the experience of millions of people in the world who have had a stroke or live with neurodegenerative conditions affecting the back of the brain – the area that controls vision. Science cannot repair a damaged brain, but in our research, I found a way to manipulate the text displayed in a reader device to compensate for this brain damage and make reading possible again. During this grant, we aim to convert these manipulation techniques into a commercially viable app to bring reading back to the lives of people with brain injury. For that purpose, we will release an MVP of the app and will collect anonymous user data to better understand the behaviour of the app beyond the clinical setting. The collection contains data collected via the app and online surveys – anonymous data. The app collected data from users (e.g., age, gender, country, type of brain injury). Data does not contain any personal identifiable data from users.<p>What is the problem I am solving?

How would you feel if, while reading this text, letters and words started merging or disappearing, making your reading impossible, and you knew there was nothing you could do to recover your reading ability? Frightening. Devastating. That is precisely the experience of millions of people in the world who have had a stroke or live with neurodegenerative conditions affecting the back of the brain – the area that controls vision.

Science cannot repair a damaged brain, but in our research, I found a way to manipulate the text displayed in a reader device to compensate for this brain damage and make reading possible again. During this grant, we aim to convert these manipulation techniques into a commercially viable app to bring reading back to the lives of people with brain injury. For that purpose, we will release an MVP of the app and will collect anonymous user data to better understand the behaviour of the app beyond the clinical setting.</p>