Carlos Pereira, Livox CEO, Founder, and Creator, explains how Livox was made to help children with cerebral palsy, autism, and other disabilities communicate.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in May 2017.
What is your background?
Carlos Pereira: I’m an electronics engineer, but because of my daughter’s disability I had to learn how to develop, how to program.
How did you get started with all of this?
Carlos Pereira: From the moment I found out about my daughter’s disability. She has cerebral palsy due to a medical mistake. I did all that I could to help my daughter and by doing this we started helping lots of people. My daughter was the first person to have a stem cell treatment, and after that we opened a huge rehab center in Brazil for people with disabilities. Then I quit my job and started working only for people with disabilities. And one year after this rehab center was opened, I saw that my daughter was trying to communicate and that’s when I decided to create Livox.
How did you realize that she was trying to express herself, was she getting frustrated? Can you describe for me what was going on?
Carlos Pereira: Yeah, the lack of communication can be really frustrating. I saw that she was getting frustrated, when she wanted something she tried to turn to what she wanted. Sometimes we knew what she wanted, but sometimes it was frustrating to know exactly what she wanted. I saw that she needed something to help her.
From watching your daughter with this frustration, what did you do?
Carlos Pereira: When I saw that she needed to communicate, I decided to create this software called Livox. The software is for android tablets. I started it on my cell phone, so just two options, do you like apple and yogurt for example. Clara what do you want to eat an apple or a yogurt. She would go with her hand and touch it, okay, yogurt. Then I decided to buy a tablet, and I started to create more things, and then I tested Livox with a wide range of people with disabilities in the clinic that I was working with.
I wanted to ask you about the name of the company, can you tell me what it means?
Carlos Pereira: Livox means liberty through voice. Here in the US you have two words for freedom, you have liberty and you have freedom; they’re kind of synonyms. But in Portuguese, we have only one word, Liberdade. So I took the first word, the first syllable, it’s “li” from liberty and “vox” is voice in Latin. Many of the persons with disabilities who can’t communicate orally are prisoners in their own bodies, and we wanted to set them free through voice. That’s why the name of this software is Livox.
This is for people with a wide range of disabilities, so could you bring us through the process of how it identifies what a person is trying to communicate.
Carlos Pereira: We also ask the people who want to use Livox to seek a proper therapy, someone who knows how to handle alternative communication. Livox is extremely simple to use it but the professional help is also very important. Livox has many different algorithms, and we have ways to make it different depending on a person’s disability. Here at the Florida Hospital, for example, you can have different users on your tablet. This is very useful in schools too. You can have as many users as you want. Maybe you have a user, who has some kind of visual impairment, Livox will be bigger with higher contrast. We have different kinds of algorithms and parameters to adjust Livox depending on who is using it.
You said that through using Livox your daughter was able to write a story. Can you explain to me how it gets to that more complicated mode of communication? That’s beyond, “I’m hungry for an apple or yogurt.”
Carlos Pereira: She had a task in her school that all children should write a story to be published in a book. However, she can’t grab a pencil and paper, because of her disability. Through Livox we could put the letters on screen and she can with her hand , touch the letters one by one, and once she selected what she wanted, we held her hand with the pencil and then said okay I will help you to put these on paper. By selecting each letter she could write the story she wanted to tell.
How much of an improvement did you see in your daughter, when you were able to see that she could communicate?
Carlos Pereira: The most interesting thing for me was to know exactly what is going on in her mind. I learned things she already knew that I wasn’t aware she did. For example, I was talking to her about dinosaurs and I asked Clara, are there any dinosaurs left on the earth? She said no through Livox. I said, why? She said, they’re all dead. I said how do you know that? She said, that she saw it on TV. She was watching TV with me, a TV show showing what happened to the dinosaurs and she understood everything. She was getting all this and I didn’t even know it. Knowing what’s going on in her mind this is the best thing that Livox could provide for me.
How difficult is it for parents who may not be able to have that relationship? This allows you essentially to strengthen your relationship with your daughter. Could you imagine not having that?
Carlos Pereira: It’s really complicated, I’ve seen some situations, where I have traveled around the globe because of Livox, mainly in Brazil. I was talking to a mother for example, of a boy. This boy has autism and she said to me, Carlos I understand what you’re saying how hard it is not to communicate because one day my son was so agitated and I didn’t know what was going on. He went to the kitchen, he took a knife and he cut out one of his teeth. It had a cavity and it was aching and she didn’t know about it. He had no way to tell her that he was feeling pain in his tooth. Imagine how complicated this can be, how bad this could get. It’s not only a matter of knowing what’s going on someone’s mind, but also it’s a health issue. A person might be feeling something and need a medication and you can’t help them.
Talk to me a little bit about the growth of Livox in Brazil.
Carlos Pereira: When I first made Livox and parents started using it, the word of mouth started to spread. One mother said to me, would you like to speak to forty families of people with autism here in our city. I said, yes I would and I went to talk to them and show them Livox. Then I was invited to Sao Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil and then to Rio de Janeiro and it never stopped after that. Many cities and many governments in Brazil also bought Livox. Therefore, it’s possible to find Livox in schools, institutions for people with disabilities and in some hospitals as well.
How did you get here to the United States?
Carlos Pereira: Google found us and sent a team to make a video about our story. Then they took me, my wife, and my daughter to their event in San Francisco. After that they saw what we were doing with Livox and then I showed to them one new technology that we’re developing. We received money from Google, it’s a grant and with this money I decided to move here to the US. I was granted a visa into the US; it’s a very nice opportunity to bring in talented people here in the US and that’s why I moved it in here. So we hired a team of engineers here, and then I met the Florida Hospital team and we are now working together.
Tell me a little bit about this first phase. You’re working with a certain number of patients and what are you testing?
Carlos Pereira: We are working on creating a new technology that will enable people with disabilities to communicate much faster. By using simple and complex signals, to bring relative content for people with disabilities. This is quite complicated but also it’s quite useful. Right now the Florida Hospital is testing the Phase I with simple signals. They enable people with disabilities to communicate faster, but with simple signals. Then we are moving to the next phase, where we will have complex signals like speech, controlling which process and motion learning.
Simple signals, what do you mean by that?
Carlos Pereira: One example of simple signals is GPS location and time of the day. Livox changes depending on the time of the day and the location. We also have fourteen different sensors from the tablet, these fourteen sensors give us information, and we are working to improve Livox based on the information that has been collected.
What’s the next step then?
Carlos Pereira: The next step is to use complex signals, where we are going to use Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Also, we are working to make Livox available to as many person’s with disability here in the US as possible.
What kind of a difference have you seen that your invention making in other people’s lives?
Carlos Pereira: Livox is helping so many people with disabilities. People ask me how we came up with Livox and I say, if I was supposed to create software for the Navy for example, how could I possibly create the best software in class? If I lived in a boat for six months, I would understand the needs of the Navy and then I could create software for them. Well I’ve been living on this boat for nine years and I can’t get off this boat. So we have a deep understanding of the needs of people with disabilities and how to transform these needs one word in to software.
Tell me about your daughter. She’s nine years old, what’s she like? What’s her personality like?
Carlos Pereira: My daughter she is really funny. She’s a very happy little girl, of course, she has her moments because her disability is quite frustrating, but she’s very happy. Many people ask me, okay what has she told you about her using Livox that you know will have a huge impact. Well I have talked a lot to her through Livox, but one day I was asking her, what Disney princess she is. Because she has seen all the Disney movies, so I wanted to know which one she was. She said she’s Ariel. Ariel, why Ariel, I thought maybe because Ariel has no legs. But then she said, no I’m Ariel because Ariel can’t speak. If you see the movie, for most of the movie Ariel can’t speak. I was like in shock by what she told me. If you also saw the movie you remember that by the end of the movie, magic happens and Ariel starts to speak. Our lives are not a Disney movie but this doesn’t mean we can’t create something magical for people with disabilities. I’m really happy to have created this for my daughter and for so many others.
People from all over the country will see this and want to know, how can I get my hands on this. Is there a way to do this?
Carlos Pereira: They can go our website, its www.livox.com.br or they can go to our other website, its www.inclusionwithoutborders.org. Through these websites they can find directions on how to get Livox, and they can also download it from the Google play store.
So it’s as easy as downloading, no special training?
Carlos Pereira: Yes, they have to download Livox from the play store. It’s extremely simple to use Livox, but we also give training. The thing is what used makes Livox so successful is a tripod, its three things. The first thing is the technology that we provide with Livox; the second thing is family commitment. The family must be really committed to making this work. The third thing is a professional help. Some parents don’t have any idea on how to use an alternative communication device. Sometimes they don’t understand that their kids, if you put a drawing of a banana, will not understand that the drawing means a banana. I really recommend seeking professional help on how to use alternative communication. But Livox is a device that makes alternative communication much easier, and less intimidating.
If people could walk away with one thing, what would it be?
Carlos Pereira: Well I would like everyone to remember the words of the American Senator, Daniel Webster. He said, if all my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would chose to keep the power of communication for by it I would soon regain all the rest.
Communication is basic, like when a baby is born he cries, he is communicating through crying. He cries if he wants to eat, if he needs to be changed. Therefore, communication is a basic human need.
Your daughter’s cerebral palsy was a medical mistake, so you and your wife didn’t have any warning during the pregnancy?
Carlos Pereira: Yes, it was really complicated because we did everything right during my wife’s pregnancy. I used to say that some days are capable of changing history. For example, September eleventh, that day a series of terrible events changed the world forever. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but my daughter was also born on September eleventh. On that day a series of terrible events left my daughter with cerebral palsy. Bad things can happen you know. The US had their own September eleventh, I had my private September eleventh, but you can come up with something good even when bad things happen.
END OF INTERVIEW
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