Spotlight: Lotus

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VOICEOVER: Spotlight: Lotus. Speaker, Dhaval Patel, CEO of Lotus. Natalie Shearer, Head of Accessibility and Operations for Lotus. Moderator, Matthew Krieger, President of Cober, Inc.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Okay, thanks, Karae and Ross at Sight Tech Global. Right now, I’m here with Dhaval Patel, founder of Lotus. Dhaval, nice to see you.

DHAVAL PATEL: Nice to see you too. Glad to be here.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Thanks for coming. And maybe you could give an overview of the product and the impact that you’re aiming to make.

DHAVAL PATEL: That’d be great. Quick verbal description of myself. So hi, everyone. My name is Dhaval Patel, Electrical Engineer by training, and I’ll be happy to share more about Lotus in a second. I’m a mid-30s Indian. Guy wearing a brown sweater with a New York flat iron building backdrop and black hair with a little bit of facial hair. So that’s me. Happy to share more about Lotus. And the story really starts with me. I was born with twisted knees. And over the years, I’ve been on and off crutches a lot myself. Now, one night, a few years ago, I got into bed, having left the lights on accidentally. But I was too tired to get out of bed, hop onto my crutches, hobble 10 feet, turn off the light, hobble back 10 feet, and get back into bed. So I just slept with the lights on. The entire night. And woke up in the morning, not having slept really well, thinking, well, if somebody like me, I’m an electrical engineer, I’ve managed a division at Apple for iPhone, watch, and AirPods. I’ve even worked at the company that makes wall switches. I’ve worked at Lutron. I have 37 patents. If an engineer like me doesn’t even have smart home technology in their own home, what about everybody else? So I started researching. And it turns out, 91% of U. S. homes were built before smart homes even existed. But with no easy way to upgrade. Even getting something like an Alexa means rewiring every wall switch to connect to the internet to be able to talk to Alexa. Then repeating speakers in every room that you just rewired your switches. And finally pairing every switch one by one through another. And just that first step is about 11 hours of rewiring or $2,000 if you can afford a contractor. And this is all best case if you own the house. If you’re renting an apartment, there’s no solution. If you’re traveling for work or for pleasure, there’s no solution. You can’t bring your smart home with you. And so it affects everyone, but it disproportionately affects people like me, especially about 27 million people with limited mobility. We’re talking veteran soldiers, older adults. And disabled persons who are spending up to an extra four hours at home on self-care daily. So to solve this, we built this wearable ring that controls objects at home by pointing. But unlike traditional smart home technologies, there’s no apps, no rewiring, and no internet. It’s completely offline. The way it works, step one, you put on the ring. That eliminates needing a smart speaker in every room of the house. Step two, you can snap on to existing wall switches and magnets eliminate any rewiring. Step three, just like a TV remote, all you do is point and click. And using infrared eliminates the need for any apps or smartphones or even internet. Now with the starter kit that includes one ring and three switch covers, and the starter kit being $299, you can control anything the wall switch controls. Now you can control obviously lights, but you can also control fans. You can control appliances like a window AC that you see in rental apartments. In fact, today we can even control televisions. And for televisions, you need no switch cover. It turns out this is actually a $335 billion prop tech industry. That’s been over 80% untapped because of the limitations earlier for over a decade now. And with Lotus, essentially you’re able to control everything. You can control offline objects in seconds. Or to put it differently, you can convert any space into an accessible space in seconds. And you can take that accessible space with you wherever you go. And that combo is what seems to really be resonating with people. Now very early on, we were originally thinking direct-to-consumer. And when we started to do that, the first 50 user interviews turned into 5,000 signups just through word of mouth. Now we’ve pivoted to B2G, which is government, and B2B. And we’ve gotten over 14 pilot requests in just the first 30 days, including with the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the state of New York, who has now given us an LOI for 10,000 devices. It’s about $3 million in revenue, similar with the VA, where we have an LOI that’s a million recurring every three years. Now as much as I’m the one talking, it’s been an entire team effort of engineers and clinicians, formerly from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart Health, even a TEDx disability speaker, and most recently, the director of Nest from Google, who joined Lotus for just sweat equity and no salary. Our long-term vision is to build this future where there’s a whole universe of ring-controllable objects and where caregivers will be able to subscribe to device data, giving them peace of mind. Ultimately, so that any person, whether they’re young or old, disabled or not, renter or homeowner even, can just stay at home with autonomy and dignity. Because dignity is something that just can’t wait for better times. That is Lotus.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: That’s wonderful. Dhaval, you and I have spoken before, and one of the things that I think we identified is that when people initially look at this product, they want to make a comparison to other smart ring products. And one of the things that we talked about was that the only thing in common really is the form factor. The design intent, the engineering constraints are completely different. Correct? And could you elaborate on some of that?

DHAVAL PATEL: That’s correct. It’s a great point. Thanks, Matt. Essentially, all the other smart rings that you see out there all have to do with this. They have to do with health. They’re all measuring your heart rate, your pulse oxygenation levels, or some other health metric. This ring, other than the form factor being a ring, has nothing to do with health. It’s essentially a way for you to control your home environment. It’s the social model of disability. But the goal is to be able to do that, be able to convert any space into an accessible space in seconds, so that no matter where you are and where you go, you always can control your environment, literally from your fingertips.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: So what did that mean then from a design process and an engineering process in order to achieve that outcome? Because what looks like a piece of metal and plastic is probably pretty complex inside in order to achieve that objective.

DHAVAL PATEL: Yeah, it’s a really good point. I mean, I was convinced initially that this was a really terrible, terrible idea. I was convinced. And so initially for the first nine months, all I did were different types of interviews. I was interviewing people with different kinds of disabilities, no disabilities, family members, and clinicians. And even within disabilities, everyone from folks with limited mobility, such as myself, or folks with low vision or no vision, folks with cognitive or developmental disabilities, and the whole spectrum. And there were a few things that came out of that with regards to the technology, and I’ll focus specifically on the tech. Everyone wanted the benefits of a smart home, but without all the pain points or the friction associated with setup or associated with usage. Meaning everyone wanted a smart home, but no one wanted to do rewiring of their home. No one wanted to use another app. Lots of people really disliked the fact that they needed really good internet because either there were pockets of the house that didn’t have good internet, or they were just in an area where you often lose internet, like if you’re in Hurricane Alley or Tornado Alley. Or they just had intermittent internet. Maybe they were out in a rural area where there’s not good internet or not consistent internet. And so those were things people did not want. In terms of things people wanted, the common piece of feedback was folks wanted something that they could use with one hand. So the most common feedback we would get is, ‘hey, can you please make something that does not have a display? Because anything that has a display, a phone or a watch, needs two hands in order to use it. And you have to be able to look at the device simultaneously. So if your one hand is occupied, let’s say you’re holding a baby or you’re holding grocery bags or you have a disability that prevents use of one arm, you can look at your device but often can’t use it.’ Or if your hands are free but you’re unable to look at the device, you can’t use it either. So if you have small kids running around or if you have pets. And so that was a common request. Can you please make something that we can use with one hand without looking at the device? And the final point was anything that we can use in bed at night. And the only thing people had with them, on them in bed at night, were their wedding rings. Necklaces came off, earrings came off, Apple Watches were being charged. And so that’s why we started off as the ring form factor and worked our way back.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: One of the realizations that I had come to when talking to you, which was sort of powerful to me, was that your product allows the user to essentially express their intent for a given outcome, the lights, the TV, whatever that is. And that the expression of that intent with limited physical requirements is quite empowering. And can you maybe for a moment address that from a technical challenge point of view and then also from how that manifests itself with the users that you’ve worked with?

DHAVAL PATEL: Absolutely. And so typically in a single family home, you have on average 40 to 60 wall switches. So you have lots of switches in the same room. It was important for us to design the technology, A, in a way that you can make it simple to understand and simple to use. And B, as part of that, being able to control lots of different things, because like I said, a typical home has lots of different things you’re trying to control. So the way our technology works, step one, you put on the ring. There is a single button on the device. So there’s only one button on the ring. We usually recommend putting the ring on your pointer finger so that the button is right next to your thumb. So that’s step one. Step two, for any existing wall switch, so I’m showing in my hand a regular toggle switch, the switches that you flip up and down. It does not matter what the switch controls. All you do is bring the second half of the Lotus system near the switch and it snaps on using magnets. So it does not, there’s no need for rewiring. Now you can also manually control to use the device like you would. So you can, other folks in the family can regularly walk up to the wall switch and push it because there is a button on the surface. Or step three, you can just point and click. Now the unique thing about this is it’s more like an infrared flashlight. You can have many wall switches in the same space, but only the one you’re aiming towards roughly will turn on and off. It’s not a laser beam, so you don’t have to hunt for your wall switch. But at the same time, it’s a little different than a TV remote that just sprays infrared. And so instead of turning on one thing, we actually tried using TV remotes. It turns out that doesn’t work because TV remotes just blast infrared and everything in the room turns on and off. So from a technology standpoint, the difficult part was making it so that you got a really long range with really long battery life, but still making it so your intent, like you mentioned, was clear. So you can have many wall switches in the same room. You can have a wall switch for your lights on the left. You can have your TV in front of you and let’s say a fan switch on the right. And only the thing you’re aiming towards will turn on and off. And that’s by design. So it’s very simple to understand and very simple to use. All you do is this little motion. And as long as you’re facing the right direction, you’ll turn on or off only the thing you’re aiming towards.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: So when you went back, when you look at the design process around this and you had to pack this intelligence, this directionality, this battery life into this small form factor, what of those things, or maybe not mentioned yet, were the biggest constraints that you had to go over? You mentioned, for example, that you had to focus this beam so that you could give people relative precision and avoid frustration of turning on and off the right thing. What were some of the other design constraints that you had to conquer?

DHAVAL PATEL: Yeah. So one of the factors are range. Of course, the whole idea is it’s sort of like a little universal remote on your fingertips. And so obviously, for a remote to be really helpful, you want the range to be really good. So we guarantee at least 30 feet of range. You can obviously be closer, but the device will continue working even if you’re 30 feet away from whatever you’re trying to control. In fact, in our testing, we’ve seen up to 38 feet, and then we just physically ran out of space. The trade-off was the engineering challenges came from the fact that you can just get that range by cranking up power. Unfortunately, then what happens is when you go to a small room, infrared can bounce around in the same space. Infrared cannot penetrate walls, which is good for privacy, but it can bounce in the same room. And so the difficult part was engineering it so that you get long range, but when you’re in a small room, it’s still only behaving like a flashlight. That was one aspect. The other aspect had more to do with battery life. So the nice thing is, unlike charging it every day like an Apple Watch or charging it every three days like an Aura Ring, you only need to charge the Ring or charge the Switch Cover once in 90 days. So you only need to charge it once in three months. And in fact, that’s what we guarantee. Typically, you only need to charge it once in five or six months. So those were kind of the hard things to hit.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Dale, have you or your end users identified other potential applications that maybe were not part of your original design intent, but seemed to be emerging as possible interesting use cases?

DHAVAL PATEL: Absolutely. So one of the first things that came up were, hey, I would love to turn on and off my television. The nice thing about that is you can already do that today. You can turn on and off your existing television. What’s coming up next, the current version of the Ring can only do on and off. Future versions of the Ring, the same button can do change channel. So left and right is change channel. And front and back on the button is increase, decrease volume. And when you map that to the objects, you can start dimming lights or adjusting a fan speed for just not being on and off, but somewhere in the middle. So today what we control is TVs and anything that the wall switch controls. So if the wall switch controls a light, you can control lights. If the wall switch controls a fan, you can control the fan, and so on. Next, anything that plugs into a wall, you’ll be able to control that. In fact, I’m already living on three working prototypes in my own home. After that, it’s drapes. So drapes, curtains, et cetera, and then doors. And we’re specifically working in that order because those are the objects that you have to interact with every day. And in that order, because the complexity of the object and the weight of the object gradually keeps increasing, the doors are being the heaviest. So that’s what’s ending the pipeline.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: And so at some point, the complexity of the receiver will go from a binary type of on-off device to something that has more understanding of the semantics of the device that is meant to control.

DHAVAL PATEL: Correct. So you’ll go from binary to analog. So you can dim lights, you can adjust fan speeds, you can open and close a door midway and sort of all the way up. We open or close and so on.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Super. So I’d like to introduce Natalie into the conversation. So Natalie, you are the head of accessibility at Lotus. My understanding is that initially you were an accessibility consultant for Lotus and Dhaval requested an interview with you from an end user perspective and as a subject matter expert. Maybe you could comment on that.

NATALIE SHEARER: Yeah, definitely. Hi, Matt. Thank you for having me. I am Natalie. Quick self-description. I’m a white woman with very short brown hair. I’m wearing a green sweater and I have a blurred beige background. Yeah, as you mentioned, I worked in accessibility consulting. So I myself live as a disabled woman. I have something called Usher syndrome, which is a form of deaf-blindness. So I am legally blind with a small amount of usable central vision and hard of hearing, so I wear hearing aids in both ears. And I was working as an accessibility consultant helping organizations with their accessibility efforts, helping them become more disability inclusive. And I had posted something on LinkedIn about a project that I was working on. It was assistive technology and my experiences with it. And it seemed to catch the LinkedIn algorithm and somehow ended up on Davil’s feed. And he reached out to me. It was a very vague but intriguing request to get some feedback on this ring that he was developing. And at the time, there wasn’t much information available about it on the internet. I think it was just a one-page website that said, ‘Ring to move objects by pointing.’ So it just seemed like magic. So I was intrigued. I met with Davil. And it turned into part one of a three-part user interview. And I always say it was almost like breakthrough therapy sessions. Because the first question he asked me was, ‘What are some of the biggest accessibility barriers you face at home?’ And my gut response was, ‘I don’t face barriers at home.’ I face them as soon as I leave my house. And it was as he was asking me, asking me more specific questions that I realized there are a lot of barriers in my house. I’ve just gotten so used to them that I’ve adapted the way that I live to sort of fit my home. And I know that’s a pretty universal experience. You kind of just get used to tripping over furniture or leaving lights on at night. Funny enough, that’s part of Davil’s story. It was also part of mine. And when I eventually joined the team and was able to see all these other user interviews, I saw it was a common theme that came up. Leaving lights on so that you don’t have to cross a dark room to turn them off. And so through the interview, I saw the impact that the technology would have on my own life. But I thought of other people, like my grandma who’s 90 and fiercely independent. I thought of my mom who was diagnosed with ALS when I was 10 and lived with it for seven years. And the difference it would have made in her life kind of going back to what you endowed her with, Davil, we were talking about earlier, is everybody wants autonomy, everybody wants dignity, and we all deserve dignity. And so it’s just interesting on the user side of it, how much it made me realize how inaccessible my own home is and how beneficial the technology could be. But I also just was blown away by this whole user interview process. A big part of my job as a consultant was helping companies learn about these principles of universal design and inclusive design, and sort of integrate it. And to see that Davil was doing that from the beginning, it was something that I really wanted to be a part of. And we have different versions of this story. I have the microphone, so I’m sharing mine. I wanted to be a part of it. And yeah, it’s a truly, I’m just one person on the team. Everybody on the team has a really personal connection to the mission, whether it’s lived experience or a loved one with lived experience with disabilities. And at the end of the day, we all experience disability, whether it’s permanent, temporary, the result of aging. So on the team side of it, within my role, it’s really amazing to take that mission of optimizing for disability and applying it to everything that we do. We’re following a similar human-centered design process with our packaging. Same thing, sort of doing user interviews, asking people, what their pain points are when opening packaging. We’re doing that with our website now. And also just building the culture of the company. We’re a remote company. We’re sort of all over the world in different time zones. And one thing that we know is like flexible work arrangements really help folks with disabilities. And then at the same time, it helps everyone. You know, people with families really benefit from flexible schedules, people in different time zones, you know, establishing best practices for information sharing. It’s not only helpful for people with disabilities, it benefits all of us. So to be part of a mission like that from the beginning, it’s really amazing.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Could you comment a little bit on how you use the product throughout the day and make concrete for some of the watchers here what that experience could look like so that they can think about it as well?

NATALIE SHEARER: Yeah, yeah. So to contextualize the form of vision loss that I have, I have something called retinitis pigmentosa. So that means I have a small amount of central vision, but no peripheral vision or night vision. And a way that I can explain it is I can see a light switch on the other side of the room, but I can trip over the couch on the way to get there because I can see what I’m looking at. I just can’t see anything around it. And I have two children who like to leave things all over the house. So I’m quite prone to injury. So for me, it’s a way of A, being able to sort of get the lights myself and create a more safe environment for myself. It also means not asking my children or my partner to do those smaller things for me, which is something that comes up a lot with folks that we talk about. It’s the small things every day where as long as you can maintain independence, it really changes sort of how you feel, your confidence levels. Yeah. And the autonomy that you feel.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Do you have from your time at Lotus now, are there specific ideas that you’ve had that have made it into the product and that you are proud of today?

NATALIE SHEARER: Not yet, but I think the really amazing thing and sort of the inclusive design of the human-centered design process is: I can see how all the feedback that’s been given in the years or interviews has been worked into the product roadmap. So features that don’t exist in the product today, I can see that they are going to be integrated. I don’t know, Davil, if you want to speak any more to that.

DHAVAL PATEL: I would say there’s a couple that you mentioned which made it in essentially. So on the ring side, to be able to feel the button and where it is without having to look at the ring. And so I would say, Natalie, that kind of came from you because essentially in order to not be able to look at the device, that was kind of one thing. We’re still experimenting with different forms. So on the ring that I have, there’s a little nub, a raised surface, kind of like your keyboard. So that just with your thumb, you can feel where the button is. And so then you instinctively know where to point. There’s other kinds of recommendations Natalie has made on the packaging, which is the ease of ability to remove devices from within the packaging. So actually for everyone on the platform, I’m holding the Lotus kit right now. It has a magnetic flap. And once you open it, there are things in the box. Obviously this particular box that I’m holding up doesn’t have all devices. But Natalie sort of made it a point to tell us about it: has to be easy to be able to reach in with two fingers and just be able to pull out devices from within the packaging and make it very easy. Honestly, not something we were thinking about. We were thinking a lot about the aesthetics and the packaging and kind of having the no-stress packaging on the outside. But everything to do from the inside. In fact, the most recent example that Natalie brought up in an engineering meeting was kind of being able to tell users when the battery on the switch cover is low. And so one of the things we’ve started taking to heart is: well, how can we maybe blink something or flash something? And it’s still in development right now. In order to be able to tell users, ‘Hey, the battery is about to be super low.’ It’s been six months. Why don’t you charge it for 45 minutes? And by the way, you only need to charge it for about 45 minutes and then you get another six months. So those are some examples that come off the top of my head.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Natalie, I have one last question for you. And that is, you had commented before something which really resonates with me. And that is that products such as this are really assuming the human-centered design is really the principle. The benefits accrue not just to people who have a specific disability, but someone who may be aging or someone who is of maybe more diminished capacity, but a spectrum of use cases. And when you look at that, do you envision that down the road that there could be an expansion of the use case from a marketing perspective to just something that makes people’s lives easier in general, regardless of what the disability is that they’re looking at?

NATALIE SHEARER: Yeah, yeah. And we hear this a lot, even if we’re at conferences and people come by our table, maybe they don’t have a disability, but they think of their older adult parent that would want to use it. And they’ll typically say like, ‘I’d love to have this at my house as well.’ And I think that’s beneficial because as someone that uses assistive technology, I wear hearing aids, I use a white cane, it can be somewhat stigmatizing and it can really impact people’s likelihood of actually using their assistive technology. We see this with older adults with Life Alert necklaces, for instance. Like it’s just, in some ways, it can be this overt symbol of, you know, ‘I’m getting older, I have a disability’ and people aren’t always comfortable. So if it’s a product that everyone in the family is using, it becomes more comfortable. And we’ve also gotten feedback from some of our pilot participants that it becomes this, if they have a Lotus switch cover installed and a Lotus ring, it becomes sort of a conversation starter. You know, people asking like, what is that technology? And it becomes an approachable way to disclose maybe what your needs are around the house or if you have a disability or you’re experiencing mobility challenges.

DHAVAL PATEL: In fact, to add to what Natalie just said, one of the things that we like about this technology is people often mention that they want to gift it to their dad or granddad that they don’t live with. And the nice thing about this is if you had a Lotus ring and you visited them, your Lotus ring would continue to work in their home. And if they visited you, their ring would continue to work in your home because there is no pairing. It’s like a telephone. The more people that have it, the more beneficial your own device gets. In other words, it has network effects.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: There’s a network effect, yeah.

DHAVAL PATEL: Yeah. And so our entire thesis is built around that, which is we only do tech that anybody can use by optimizing for disability. Because once you do that, you help everybody anyway.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: Got it. Natalie, I have one last question. I think we have one minute here. Are there any other devices that you use either in conjunction with the Lotus ring or to solve other problems to help people think about how assistive devices in general can make their lives better?

NATALIE SHEARER: Yeah. So I actually, I’m wearing my Lotus ring now. I just got mine. I got my first waterproof. This is the final product. So I’m still kind of learning how I’ll be able to use it beyond controlling lights within my house and any wall switches. I wear hearing aids every day. I use my phone, a lot of different features on my phone. Yeah, I don’t use a ton of assistive technology beyond my white cane, which is a very low-tech version of assistive tech.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: This is super. Thank you so much, Dhaval and Natalie. What makes me so encouraged about hearing this and about talking to you is, while Lotus may be focused on a ring product today, my guess is that there’s a whole world of accessible product options in the company’s future. So I know that I’m appreciative of that and I think a lot of people will be appreciative of that as well. So I want to thank Natalie and Dhaval from Lotus.

DHAVAL PATEL: Well, thanks, Matt. It’s been a pleasure talking to you and a pleasure being here today. I really also wanted to thank Sight Tech Global, the Vista Center for setting this amazing event up and also setting up the Ignite Pitch Competition, without which we wouldn’t really be here. It was a fantastic opportunity to reach more people, reach a wider audience, to really share kind of the mission we believe in, and you know, to share the technology that we’re at today. So huge thank you. We really appreciate the opportunity. It was a pleasure and a pleasant surprise to win. But yeah, it’s been an amazing journey so far, meeting everyone that we’ve met so far. So thank you to Sight Tech Global. Thank you to the Vista Center. And thank you for this incredibly amazing Ignite Pitch Competition. I hope to see it for many, many years to come. Thank you.

MATTHEW KRIEGER: I’d like to turn things back over to Karae and Ross from Sight Tech Global.

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