Reveal Stories: Empowered care

Empowering learners with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

1. What is the problem that you are committed to solving?
   
   Teachers and educators are too often undervalued and poorly supported; this is particularly true for educators supporting students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The lack of support often leads to segregated classrooms where students who learn differently are separated from their typically developing peers.
   
   To be successful and to meet personal learning and life goals, these students who learn differently require the dedicated support of their families, peers, educators, and therapists. Yet these groups are separated by red tape, financial barriers, or access to training resources and end up working in silos. As a result, the support that is available for these students at school usually defaults to basic, standardized approaches
   
   

2. What is the solution you are proposing?
   
   Our solution to providing personalized learning opportunities for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as valuable support for educators is Reveal - the trusted AI-powered knowledge and collaboration platform.
   
   Using Reveal, families, educators, and therapists can easily exchange knowledge and information to support students as they meet their personalized learning and life goals. Teams can collaborate on the private & secure platform to understand which factors lead to the best outcomes for their students. Reveal includes visual summaries, progress reports, and open lines of communication that foster an ecosystem of collaboration and understanding.
   
   In the future, Reveal will integrate with real-time, continuous measures of physiological signals to provide even more insights into how students learn, their stress levels, and the effectiveness of different teaching and therapy approaches.
   
   

How will your solution change the world?

Reveal has already made an impact for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as their educators across North America. In one case, a minimally verbal student with autism was repeating kindergarten while the student’s typically developing twin moved on to Grade 1. By implementing Reveal, the student’s teachers felt more supported and valued in their contributions to care than ever before. In fact, the student’s teacher told us:
“There is no greater example of a team approach than this. 22 years ‘in the business’, and I have never felt so connected, valued, or included.”
The information collected with Reveal also allowed the team to devise new personalized learning strategies, and the student experienced a significant increase in focus and engagement in the classroom. The student has now graduated to Grade 1.

Reveal can lead to better learning opportunities for students, and set them up to success on the road to adulthood. This will lead to an increase in people with intellectual and developmental disabilities entering the workforce. Looking at autism alone; there are over 5 million people in North America currently diagnosed with some form of autism. 90% of adults with autism are currently unemployed or underemployed. An increase in the number of people with autism entering the workforce will have a massive social and economical impact.

Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities require support from family, educators, and therapists. This support relies on information sharing, strong collaboration, and evidence-based interventions. Existing solutions require a high level of training and expertise to use, are challenging to customize, and do not translate across disciplines and settings.

Reveal is a new technology that offers a one-stop solution to these challenges. It is an engaging and flexible platform that fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing, as well as reliable data collection. Reveal uses Natural Language Processing to present insights on a single canvas, and identify predictors of best outcomes.

Reveal is a technology-based platform built for smartphones and computers. The prevalence of Internet-connected devices is integral to the success of Reveal, as are the reduction in cost of cloud computing resources and the advances in the field of artificial intelligence. 

Reveal uses AI to identify which interventions and teaching strategies best support students with intellectual and developmental disabilities to reach their personal goals. In the future, Reveal will also integrate with wearable devices that measure the body’s physiological signals.

In the next 12 months, we will have launched and completed a large scale study with 3000+ students with autism to measure the social, educational, and economic impacts of Reveal. This study will focus on people living in US States where the insurance policies for autism treatment are moving to outcomes-based reimbursement. The outcome from the large scale study is to secure a contract with one large insurance provider. 

We will also launch a series of pilots with communities of people with other intellectual and developmental disabilities to begin scaling our solution beyond the autism community.

1 out of 6 people worldwide are diagnosed with an intellectual or developmental disabilities. Our ultimate vision is to establish Reveal as the most trusted global AI-powered knowledge and collaboration platform to support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In the next 3-5 years, our vision is to distribute Reveal to 1 million students worldwide with an intellectual or developmental disability to help them reach their personal learning and life goals with the help of their families, therapists, and educators.

Reveal is available as a mobile and web application. We will expand our reach to people with intellectual or developmental disabilities and their families through our existing partners and engage with additional partners to implement Reveal in their organizations, experience its benefits first hand, and distribute the platform through their networks. People with intellectual or developmental disabilities and their families are often members of tight-knit online communities who share advice and information on new tools and approaches to care. We continue to foster relationships with these groups to help raise awareness about the benefits of Reveal.

Reveal is currently serving a small group of 100 users. One team adopted Reveal to support a 7-year old student with autism who was repeating Kindergarten. By using Reveal, the teacher and education assistant were better equipped to understand their student’s unique learning style, and felt more included and supported than ever.

Within a few weeks, the team improved their approach to care and the student experienced a significant increase in engagement, focus, and time spent in the classroom. The student has since graduated to Grade 1, and the school is implementing Reveal for each student with an IEP.

In the next 12 months, we expect to serve 5000+ autistic students, their families, educators, and therapists. In the next 3-5 years, we aim to serve 1 million people. Based on our findings, we know that our users will be benefit from Reveal in the following ways: synchronizing their teaching and therapy efforts, identifying new patterns in behaviors, designing new learning strategies, and advocating for resources. Users will feel more confident in their abilities to support students with autism, and will feel more valued, included, and supported. We have seen existing users experience these effects in a matter of weeks.

Our team has a proven track record of strong leadership, technical development, and community building. Our team includes software developers with decades of industry experience, computer scientists with dual-degrees in linguistics and psychology, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs who have led global teams and graduated from world-class mentorship programs.

We have secured over $400,000 in equity and non-dilutive funding to support the development of Reveal. We have also received commitments from large organizations such as the Geneva Centre for Autism and the Pacific Autism Family Network, who was allocated $20M in the 2018 Canadian Federal Budget to devise a national autism strategy.

The basic version of Reveal is available for individual users free of charge. Premium features of the platform are available for a monthly subscription. Prices for premium features are based on a tiered model.

This low-cost approach enables quicker adoption of the app. The true value of Reveal comes from the network effects of mass adoption; hitting a critical mass of users is therefore a priority. The direct benefits provided to users, the support of credible partners and our strong relationships with the community will solidify our position and allow for rapid growth.

To sustain the long term success of Reveal, we are engaging with funders and insurance providers to develop strategies that will scale Reveal.  Funders and insurance providers are incentivized to find ways of optimizing outcomes and increase efficiency of care for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. For example, the Ontario Ministry of Child and Youth Services recently announced an historic $500 million investment into the Ontario Autism Program to restructure support to families and allow for more interprofessional collaboration. In addition, 48 States now have mandated insurance coverage for autism treatment and some States - such as New York - are transitioning to an outcomes-based reimbursement model.

Our work depends on collaboration and support from trusted partners; from community organizations, individual families, service providers and research institutions. We believe that with the support from the Solve community we will be able to greatly expand our network of partners. We are also excited to engage with world class researchers in technology and neurodevelopmental disabilities that are part of the MIT network. Finally, we know that the mentors and cross-sectional leaders that are involved with Solve will help us improve as a team and massively scale our impact.

Key barriers for our solution to success are:

• Marketing

• Designing multi-stakeholder data consent policy

• Quantifying impact

• Connecting with insurance providers and other payers

Building trust with our users on a large scale will require the help of world-class, reputable partners. Shifting the paradigm from a siloed to a collaborative approach to care will also require buy-in from all levels; from individual users all the way to Federal governments. Finally, quantifying the social, educational, and economic impact of Reveal is an immensely ambitious and complex task. The people involved in the Solve network are well suited to help us overcome these barriers.