Scribe Digital Letterboard

For the estimated 500,000 children with nonverbal autism in the United States, participating in traditional education and performing everyday tasks can be a daunting or impossible task.

Scribe is a digital letterboard and web-based educational platform to promote communication for children with nonverbal autism to increase their independence and accelerate education. Our technology facilitates meaningful social-emotional learning among underserved young people.

Nonverbal and motor challenged individuals commonly feel trapped within their bodies due to their inability to effectively communicate with others. The inability to communicate even basic needs, such as hunger, fatigue, or discomfort turn daily activities of living into painful stressors for themselves and their families. This lack of effective communication can lead to significant secondary health issues and an underestimation of a child’s abilities. Teachers and families may not realize that individuals with autism are often fully aware of everything – just locked inside a body that refuses to cooperate. People with autism are often excluded from learning experiences because teachers have no way of eliciting useful feedback and have few or inadequate tools to help the non-reliable autistic child communicate their ideas.

Scribe is a digital letterboard and web-based educational platform to promote communication for children with nonverbal autism to increase their independence and accelerate education. Our digital letterboard enables collection of data and digital biomarkers to understand how to facilitate a non-verbal child or young adult to communicate. By tracking key parameters such as spelling rate, error rate, eye motion, vocalizations, and more, Scribe allows for parameterization of a child’s development and increased self-reliance for communication.

The Scribe system consists of a physical letterboard which includes a touch board that children can use to participate in educational experiences, express themselves, respond to questions, and interact with family and peers. The picture below shows the current prototype device, with embedded camera and electronics in the hand of a user.

It has been shown that improving the ability of children and young adults to communicate independently has significant positive impacts on the not only their own health, but also the family and caregivers of those individuals. Despite this, individuals with autism are underserved by the healthcare and innovation ecosystem in the US and globally.

Analog letterboards have existed for many years as basic tools that allow nonverbal individuals to communicate. With the help of a communication partner, users can use a letterboard to spell out words and sentences, often taking minutes for a single word.

Scribe builds on the well-understood literature in the field of autism research to enable collection of data and digital biomarkers to understand how to facilitate a non-verbal child or young adult to communicate. By tracking key parameters such as spelling rate, error rate, eye motion, vocalizations, and more, Scribe allows for parameterization of a child’s development and increased self-reliance for communication.

Scribe is a multidisciplinary team of engineers, technology enthusiastic, researchers, and business professionals with experience developing products and bringing them to market. The Scribe CEO and co-founder, Glen Meyerowitz is a UCLA Biodesign Fellow and former SpaceX engineer with experience in deep technology and applying digital and mechanical solutions to solve problems.

Our team has been working together since October 2021 to research the market opportunity and advance the novel technology behind the Scribe Board. Scribe has strategic advisors who are passionate about innovation in the autism space as each of those advisors is personally impacted by profound autism as their children are diagnosed with nonverbal autism.

The direct impact that this problem has on the Scribe founding team leads to our passion and desire to rapidly accelerate development of a solution that meets the real needs of children and families of those with nonverbal autism.

We are an early-stage team looking to develop our network and increase connections to ensure our technology solution can have the maximum impact possible. Our team is excited to engage with the broader network of mentors, alumni, partners, and more. I hope this will help us to avoid pitfalls as we go to market and increase our ability to iterate on new technology, connect with key opinion leaders, understand the research and clinical burdens that our product must meet, and successfully execute on each of these steps.

The main metric that we use to determine the impact Scribe has is the number of individuals that have used our technology, and continue to return to the Scribe platform on a regular basis. At present, there are a limited number of prototype boards that have been shipped to individuals and groups for initial feasibility testing and user feedback.

As we accelerate our development rate, the number of boards shipped and the number of active users will continue to increase at an exponential rate. Similarly, the number of data points collected on each user will increase dramatically as Scribe is used in school, at home, with friends, and in their daily lives. We expect each board to collect over 100 unique data points per day about the user which will inform the development of their disease and make recommendations on how clinicians can adjust care.

We are looking forward to continuing to engage with key opinion leaders and researchers to determine the ideal metrics and indicators that we should measure to ensure we are making progress.

We expect to develop a rigorous set of peer reviewed literature that demonstrates the value of Scribe for nonverbal children with autism. The primary impact of Scribe will be increasing the ability of these children to communicate independently. The secondary impact of Scribe may be even more impactful on the children, families, and caregivers of those with nonverbal autism.

Nonverbal and motor challenged individuals commonly feel trapped within their bodies due to their inability to effectively communicate with others. The inability to communicate even basic needs, such as hunger, fatigue, or discomfort turn daily activities of living into painful stressors for themselves and their families.

By offering children a way to communicate and increase ability to receive an education, children will see improvements in other areas of their lives. As the body of literature grows showing the value of this technology, we expect network effects to lead to increased adoption of Scribe across the US and the globe.

Scribe has already created a prototype device that has been validated by early users. About two dozens physical letterboards have been created which are regularly used by nonverbal individuals with autism and their communication partners to provide feedback on the design, recommend new features and changes, and generate early data on usage and digital biomarker trends.

Additionally, we have partnered with key opinion leaders and researchers in developmental psychology who are working to conduct studies that leverage the Scribe system to demonstrate the value of digital letterboards to promote independent education.

At this time, no academic papers are available but we will be able to share the results of ongoing studies once they are complete and peer reviewed.

Scribe is constantly striving to increase diversity of our team and collaborators and promote diversity, equity, and inclusivity in our work. The Scribe leadership team and advisors come from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences, united by their passion and dedication for appropriate solutions for problems faced by individuals with autism. Scribe looks to partner with researchers and clinicians who work with a wide range of clients across different socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. By incorporating this diverse set of viewpoints into our early development work, we will ensure that Scribe is an appropriate solution for a diverse patient population and not just one subset of users.

The Scribe business model relies on direct sales to families of children with autism. We plan to promote our technology to clinicians and researchers that interact with nonverbal children with autism at points of care to increase awareness of the value that letterboards can provide to children.

Scribe provides two unique products which each serve as an independent yet linked business model. We sell physical letterboards and provide a web-based Cloud platform with a monthly or annual subscription for users.

The physical letterboard can either be paid for out of pocket by families or it can be reimbursed by insurance using existing HCPCS codes. The subscription service is an educational platform that is paid out of pocket by families.

Analog letterboards have existed for many years and paradigms exist for teaching and training using these boards. The literature shows that nonverbal children with autism can benefit greatly from increased communication and independence. Scribe will leverage the existing literature showing the benefits of communication, and new literature that we will work with researchers to support, to demonstrate the value of the Scribe system to children, families, and caregivers.

Scribe has been bootstrapped by the founding team up to this point. We are working to bring in additional sources of funding, including non-dilutive grants such as an NSF SBIR Phase I grant to advance the technology readiness level of the system described in this proposal. We are planning a future seed round to commercialize our technology.

Scribe will become financially sustainable by product sales to customers. We expect to have two main sources of revenue to support our business: sales of physical letterboards and annual recurring revenue from a subscription service to Scribe online curriculum and Cloud platform. In this way, we expect to be generating $5.8M in revenue by 2027, or four years after commercial launch of our product.

We expect Scribe to be reimbursable by insurance as durable medical equipment (DME). Our team has conducted an extensive review of the reimbursement landscape and determined appropriate reimbursement codes for both augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices and speech generating devices (SGD), such as Scribe.

Scribe has been bootstrapped by the founding team up to this point. This has allowed us to create about two dozen prototype devices which have been shipped to partners, researchers, and key opinion leaders both in the US and around the globe. 

Scribe letterboards are currently being used by a developmental psychology researcher in one grant funded study. The development cost of the physical boards being used in that study has been paid for with grant funding from researcher.