A dishwasher door, and everything that followed.

My sister has retinitis pigmentosa. Her field of vision has narrowed year by year, and she has learned to move through a world that keeps putting things where she cannot see them.

My sister and the dishwasher have never seen eye to eye. Its open door sits at exactly the height the cane doesn't sweep and nobody thinks to look, and over the years it has caught her more times than either of them would like to admit. Once — the time I actually witnessed — it took her clean off her feet: a full barrel roll over the open door, landing flat on the other side. She got up laughing, because that's who she is, and it's family lore now. But it hurt. It had happened before. And it was going to keep happening.

I'm a problem solver by temperament and an engineer by training, so I went home and started working the problem: how do you tell someone where an obstacle is without filling up their hearing? Hearing is the sense my sister navigates by. Anything that talks over traffic, footsteps and conversation takes away more than it gives.

The idea came from my wife's field

That same week, my wife Layla — a paediatric occupational therapist specialising in sensory integration — was working through a course on the vestibular system, and I started watching it with her out of interest. What stuck was not the vestibular system specifically, but the broader idea her field works with: that the body takes in spatial information through channels below conscious attention.

The idea that mattered: the body has background spatial senses that operate below conscious attention. That suggested a different approach — delivering information through a channel that isn't already carrying something the person needs, so it might be felt rather than decoded. Whether that works as well as we think is exactly what the planned study is for.

That reframed the whole problem. Not "how do we describe the world faster", but "how do we deliver spatial information through a channel that isn't already carrying something the person needs".

I also know sight loss from the inside

Years before any of this, a medical condition took my sight. I lost my vision entirely. Within three months I could see again, and I went on to recover fully.

I want to be careful about how much I claim from that. Months of blindness is not a life of blindness, and I came out the other side. For most of the people we build for, it never comes back.

What it did give me is a memory of the specific texture of it — the way a room you know becomes unfamiliar, how much attention it takes to hold a mental map, how quickly confidence goes and how slowly it returns. I don't design from a diagram. I design from that.

Then I built it

I'm an embedded and iOS engineer. I designed the circuit boards, wrote the firmware, built the app and the on-device intelligence. My sister uses the prototype, and her feedback drives what gets built next.

That is the whole reason this company exists: a dishwasher door, and a determination to do something about it.

— Nabil Casoojee, founder