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OVIDcast by OVID Health, a global healthcare communications consultancy, explores current issues in the health and life sciences sector.
In each series, we explore a new topic, speaking to prominent figures within the healthcare landscape.
[00:00:00] Jenny Ousbey: Hello and welcome to the Health Change Maker podcast. I'm Jenny Ousbey, founder and CEO of Ovid Health, a global healthcare communications consultancy, also known as the Health Change Makers. In this new series, I'll be interviewing experts from politicians and patients to tech founders and CEOs. All with a shared passion for improving the well being of people and driving meaningful change. Join me as I meet incredible Change Makers and be inspired to become a Change Maker yourself.
So today we've got Hans Jørgen Wiberg. Hans is the founder of Be My Eyes app. It's a free mobile app with the goal of making the world more accessible for blind and low vision people. So the app allows people with a visual impairment to get in contact with sighted volunteers via a live video call, so they have access to help 24/7 without having to feel like a burden to family and friends. The app was released in 2015. It gained 10, 000 users within the first 24 hours. It's now got over 600,000 users and over 7 million volunteers in over 185 languages. So Hans and his team have successfully created the biggest online community for blind and low vision people, connecting blind and sighted people from all over the world.
Good morning, Hans. Welcome. It'd be brilliant if you could say in your own words, how you came to create Be My Eyes app for the people listening who haven't heard of it.
[00:01:50] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, thank you so much for having me here. The way it came about was that I'm blind myself and way back in 2012, I was working for the Danish Blind Federation and in that period, I got to know a lot of blind people and also some of the more tech savvy persons and one day, a person told me he was using FaceTime when he was alone and he needed to see something. Then he would just FaceTime his sister or something and I said, that's pretty cool and then he said, but I always have to call someone and then I was thinking, oh, maybe we can make a group you can call and then I was, myself experimenting with FaceTime and so, oh, this can actually be done. I remember making a FaceTime with my daughter and she was guiding me all the way around my own house and that was kind of the start of it. I had no idea how to make an app or anything. So I went to a Startup Weekend, it's called, an event at a university here in Denmark where I presented this idea and I was lucky to that the seven other people wanted to join and then we started raising money and when we did that, we started to developing and so on and, from mid 2012 and until January 2015, we were in a fundraising and developing mode and then, yeah, we launched in 2015.
[00:03:21] Jenny Ousbey: Fantastic and I think I'm right in saying that you've got what now, more than 300,000 users, and even more volunteers as part of the community and 180...
[00:03:33] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, not to brag or anything...
[00:03:34] Jenny Ousbey: Oh please brag! This is, your moment to brag Hans.
[00:03:38] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: We have, well over 600,000 and low vision people. people signed up and more than 70 million volunteers, which is kind of insane, but that's how it is. So, yeah. So many good people out there. So...
[00:03:53] Jenny Ousbey: No, that's incredible and I think I've heard you talk about before this whole concept of micro volunteering and how that's part of the key to the success of Be My Eyes app is from the volunteers side, we're not asking a lot of them, we're asking something that's, you know, really small. Are there any other factors of success in terms of the Be My Eyes app that you think have been the key ingredients to making it go global?
[00:04:22] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: I think it's way back in 2012 when we came up with this idea. There wasn't any other way you could volunteer online. Maybe there was, but I just don't know about, but the fact that you can actually lie on your couch and do something good is something that is appealing to a lot of people and it's a super easy and convenient way to become a volunteer. You just have to sign up and then one day you will get a notification and if you are available, you can just swipe, yes, I want to help and if you are busy, you just ignore the notification just like any other notification you get and we will find another volunteer who can answer. So it is a really easy and convenient way to be a volunteer and I think that's the part of the story and also a lot of people do want to help, but they are very busy and you cannot, you don't have the time to go a specific place every Wednesday to do something. But for this you can do whenever you kind of, you get the notification and you are available, so it's just a convenient way to be a volunteer.
[00:05:33] Jenny Ousbey: And have you found over the years that there are particular countries who have, you know, grasped this concept or really got on board with the Be My Eyes app faster than others. I'm interested as to whether it took off in particular countries more quickly or more slowly than others.
[00:05:51] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, the whole country thing is kind of interesting because when we developed the app, we did not have any money for marketing. So we have swept by word of mouth and of course, interviews like this one, podcasts and radio and television and so on and in this way, we have jumped from country to country and from language to language. I mean, we have 185 different languages where we can connect people and I don't think there is any country in the world where we do not have users or volunteers. Maybe not that many, but it is simply social media and so on that has helped Be My Eyes spread to basically all countries. In Brazil, for instance, we have had a number of stories going totally viral, crazy and so if you compare the number of citizens in a country and there might be a small difference from country to country, but I think it's pretty leveled out, so to speak and yeah, we have these more than 7 million volunteers globally, which also means that we can now. I mean, I'm here in Denmark and I speak Danish and I need help at two o'clock at night. We do not send a notification to anyone in Denmark in the middle of the night. But then we do have, not a whole lot, but we do have a number of Danish speaking volunteers in Australia and USA and so on and this is how we can support our users 24 7 without disturbing our volunteers 24 7. So it's pretty amazing when you have a global community what you can do.
[00:07:37] Jenny Ousbey: Yeah, absolutely and I think I want to take you back to those months and that year around 2015 when you started, because a lot of people, when they have an idea, and I think you always know if you're onto a great idea, particularly, I think if it's an idea that you can explain in one sentence, which you can, so Be My Eyes app and I think that contributes to how far the idea has spread, but you know, a lot of people have great ideas, but they don't follow through on them or they don't get to the point where they're getting funding, they don't get to the point where they're, you know, if you said yourself, you know, you're not the most tech savvy, so you're going out there, you're getting other people to be involved in to create it. So what do you think is the secret sauce to following through on an idea that you think can change something?
[00:08:28] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: For me, it was absolutely getting a team around the idea. There would not have been any Be My Eyes, by me at least, if I had not had the team around it because it's not that I'm non technical, but I have no idea how to code or anything and I'm not really a salesperson. I love to talk to our users, and I love to give interviews like this. But I'm not outselling the business side of Be My Eyes and so without good people around me, there would not have been a Be My Eyes. So I realised that other people really like to do everything themselves. I just like to do things together with other people and when you have a bad day, it's so nice that you have someone to call that actually know what you're talking about and understand and so on and, yeah, it's just, for me it's totally amazing that we have the team meeting, twice a week where we can talk about what we're doing and, so on and help each other out and then, so all that has been a major thing for Be My Eyes and if I should recommend anything, if you have an idea, get other people involved, that's the number one for me, at least.
[00:09:46] Jenny Ousbey: No, that's brilliant. I remember being told by my grandpa, who was a very wise man and he said, always hire and surround yourself by people better than you, and you'll do fine. Because I think the key to success...
[00:09:57] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Very easy for me to do, so... but absolutely and the smarter people you can hire, the smarter people they can hire. I mean, smart people want to work with smart people, and that's kind of a good way, but it can be hard to find the first smart person to hire. But it's really important that you get the best you can find and afford to pay of course.
[00:10:20] Jenny Ousbey: Absolutely. No, totally agree and so that's part of the key to success. Are there any, maybe particularly in the early days, but you know, even now, were there failures that you had or particularly difficult points where you felt like maybe it wasn't going to work or you felt at the time you had to spend a lot of time trying to resolve?
[00:10:44] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, we knew it was possible to do this on a technical level, but we did not have a business plan and that became quite a slog, because in the beginning we had some money from some of the biggest foundations here in Denmark. But sooner than we would like to know we have spent those money and we needed to raise additional money to keep Be My Eyes running and the way we did that was that we decided from day one that Be My Eyes should be a free service, simply because the most of the blind people in this world, they live in what we call the global south and they most likely have access to smartphones, but we could not see any way where we could charge them $10 a month or anything and our goal was to help as many blind people as possible or make the connection so they could get the assistance they needed and so that is kind of the goal, but that is also kind of a hard business plan to give everything away for free. So we were lucky that we, I think in 2017, we made a partnership with Microsoft and the partnership is where you as a blind person, when you have an issue with something Microsoft related, you can open the Be My Eyes app and you can call directly to Microsoft support and then they know it's a blind person because the call is coming from Be My Eyes because they were super frustrated when blind people was calling their call center because most of the agent has no idea what a screen reader is or how a blind person at all is navigating a smartphone and so on. But then we could route all the calls to specific agents who knew about being blind and some of the agents has taken well over 10,000 Be My Eyes calls. So I mean even before you call them, they know what you're going to ask them and Be My Eyes and Microsoft is so happy about this and Microsoft is willing to pay Be My Eyes a monthly subscription and we have made similar partnerships with Google and Spotify and LinkedIn and Procter Gamble and a number of other companies and that is how we can keep Be My Eyes as a free service for our users globally and that was one of the, for me at least, the hardest thing to build and also where I needed people to sell this solution to other companies and so on, so it has been a struggle, but we succeeded.
[00:13:31] Jenny Ousbey: That's so interesting because I think that one of the things that we find a lot is that we work with life sciences companies and they often want to work in partnership with patient organisations in all kinds of different disease areas and I think getting that power of partnership right and striking the right balance so that both sides benefit ultimately to create impact for patients is something that, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about and I know that as well as the partnerships that you just talked about with Microsoft and Google, et cetera, I know that recently you've been developing partnerships with Lego, for example. So I'd be really interested to understand a bit more about, yeah, that power of partnerships to spread this community idea, I suppose and how you think it can benefit the wider sight loss community.
[00:14:21] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: I'm super proud of Lego because that's the only Danish company that we have on Be My Eyes and Lego, they made some braille bricks and in that time, they also wanted to make a partnership with Be My Eyes. So that was kind of it. But I would like to use Microsoft or Google as the best examples, because when you are using Be My Eyes to call those huge tech companies and you get the right person, then they can solve the issue you have in 50 percent of the time. So these companies, they are not doing it just because they think Be My Eyes is a great idea, they are also doing it because they can actually save money and time and have more satisfied customers. Blind people are also customers, but sometimes they need to be assisted in another way than sighted people and that is kind of the secret sauce, you can say, that we can assist our users. So it both benefits our users, but also, the companies get an easier way to serve their customers.
[00:15:34] Jenny Ousbey: Oh, absolutely. It's a win-win isn't it? And I think when that happens, then everybody's happy. I wanted to ask, cause one of the topics that I know that you've been thinking about over the past couple of years is about how technology, particularly AI for example, can help accessibility more broadly. So be really interested to understand where you think we're headed in terms of the potential and I suppose what excites you, but also maybe what questions you think still need to be answered in terms of how we can harness the power of AI.
[00:16:11] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: February last year, we got a call from OpenAI and they asked if we want to make a partnership with them about a new technology they had developed where they could describe images and we were, of course, super, super excited about that. We also had to tell them that Be My Eyes is a free app and we will not charge our users anything for this service as well. Are you okay with that, OpenAI? And they were, luckily and that was how we got into the AI area and also, and this was for me as a blind person, I was really proud that we could... suddenly, the blind people were in the forefront of the thing that everybody was talking about and to be honest, we are not quite used to be, that much in front of any new thing. Normally, there's a new thing, and then, two years later, it's made adjustable because we have been fighting for that. But in this case, Be My Eyes and all our users were in on developing this and we have a huge group of beta testers who were helping us frame this, so we could really bend the technology to the need of our users and that was an amazing thing and we really believe and we can see that AI is perfect for making iPhones and Android phones easier to use because even though we have voiceover and we have talkback that makes it possible for blind people to navigate their smartphones, all those people who are new to being low vision or blind, they really struggle with technology and we believe that Siri will be a lot more capable and a lot easier to talk to and you will not have to use some super specific words to trigger the phone to do something. But in the next year, I believe that all smartphones will be a lot easier to use and also for people who are not tech savvy at all, because you could simply ask in plain words, questions to your phone and it will answer them. What worries me a little bit is that there is still hallucinations. Sometimes it gets things wrong, and it gives you a very persuasive answer and that's not a good thing. It has gotten dramatically better at it. In the beginning when we took a photo with the Be My AI, as we call it and there was a text in this photo, the first two sentence would be perfect and then it will sometimes just make up the rest of the page and so it was basically not useful or functional. If you took a picture of your garden, it will give you a wonderful and precise description of what your garden looks like, but text was really not good, but it is improving still, it's not perfect yet and that's also why we say, don't use this on medicine and so on. You can use it if you need, who is this letter from or something like that, but if it is something that is really important, you need to use a real OCR scanning feature. So that's kind of the concern, but I am really excited about what AI will do for the blind community. I'm worried what it will do to society as such, but yeah, I will kind of stick to my area, but it is an extremely powerful technology that we need to use with care. But on a personal level, I'm super, super excited. Oh, yeah.
[00:20:13] Jenny Ousbey: I love what you said about bending the technology to the needs of the blind people because, you know, for generations that technology, it's gone the other way. You've had to bend kind of how you know, people live their lives to technology and I think that's the exciting thing, isn't it? But I think you're right about, it's essentially how we need to feed the machine. In the best possible way so that the answers that the machine, the AI gives us are accurate and so I think it's that responsibility, isn't it, from everybody is our inputs are what is training essentially AI to be more and more accurate. So, but I, really liked that idea about, yeah, the technology bending to meet the needs of people in the community, as opposed to the other way around.
[00:21:02] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: And I had never thought that I should kind of think about this, but small countries, Denmark is a small country, but there are many countries who are even smaller and I know that Iceland has on a government level, they have done a huge effort to put as much Icelandic language into these last language models, simply to make it possible for the people of Iceland to also be part of this AI because if you cannot use it in your own language, then you will lose half the population that doesn't speak English. So there's so many things that are in play here. I believe we have almost 7,000 different languages in this world and I don't know how many of them will be able to kind of benefit from AI, but it's a wise thing for super small confused languages to actively put data into AI if you want to be a part of this. So, it's a super interesting area.
[00:22:10] Jenny Ousbey: No, I agree, I agree. So on a completely different subject, so I've spent most of my working life in communications and I would say that, you might not say this, but I think that you spend a lot of your working life in communications in different forms as well and one of the things that really struck me is that when you have been communicating and sharing the message about Be My Eyes app, you quite often use humour to get the message across in your interviews, I've seen it in your TED talk, and you might, I don't even know if you're aware that you're doing it, but I was really interested about how you feel humour can sometimes get across a really serious message and how effective you find it.
[00:22:54] Hans Jorgen Wiberg: Well, thank you for noticing that and sometimes when you meet someone, in a situation that you don't know really how, I mean, you meet a blind person and, oh, do I have to be really careful now? Or, can this person take it? Or, and so on, so for me personally, being or trying to be a little funny sometimes, that opens up and it makes me being blind not dangerous in any way and other people have a very different view of this, but for me in my life, the humour that I have has helped me tremendously make situations easy and easygoing and so on. But you have to be super careful about using humor when you are communicating on social media and so on. But we try not to be too boring, but it's a balance, absolutely.
[00:23:59] Jenny Ousbey: That's interesting about humour as a tool to make other people more comfortable about difficult subjects, because I think that's been used really effectively in campaigns around cancer awareness, for example, and you know, really super serious topics of conversation. But I think you're very perceptive around, you know, if people feel uncomfortable about something that's different to their own lives, as long as you do it in a caring way, I think using that humour as a gateway to deliver a more serious message, I think can be really effective and I'm sure everybody laughs at your jokes, Hans, including your children and your family. So, I think that's important.
[00:24:42] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, we need to... sometimes there may be a little too much dad jokes.
[00:24:52] Jenny Ousbey: That's fine. I think you're allowed to make dad jokes, I think that's absolutely fine, and what about, so the title of the podcast is Change Makers and you know, we think you're a Change Maker, which is why I'm interviewing you, but I'd really love to hear from you, who do you think is a change maker? So who do you look up to and think, wow, you know, what they're doing is really making a difference, really genuinely changing things and making an impact and it can be in any field of life.
[00:25:24] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, I have had the honour of meeting the guy who was in charge of making iPhones accessible. I remember very clearly in 2007 when the iPhone came out and I was almost shocked. This is super, super cool, but how can a blind person use a glass surface phone with basically no button? And it wasn't until iPhone 3S, that they got to be accessible and before that we had Nokia phones and Nokia phone was not accessible out of the box, you had to buy something extra and load into them and then you could make them accessible. But Apple decided to make it a free thing that you could just turn on and that has simply made it a really change because then they also did the same thing because yeah if Apple is doing then we better do it as well so the decision to do that for free and it's not an easy thing to make this voiceover program, I can tell you. So that is one of the things that I admire the most and he was Mike Shebanek and he was in charge of it. I realize he is not the only one who deserves credit for this. But in the blind community, I think that is one of the most important things that has happened. So I really admire Apple and, especially him for being in charge of that.
[00:27:07] Jenny Ousbey: What about, so I tend to find that if you're somebody who wants to make change happen, you're not going to stop after one change and I don't know what your family think, but you know, I feel like you're the type of person who isn't going to stop trying to want to improve things and want to change with, after Be My Eyes. So is there anything left in this world where in your dreams, if you had all the resources, all the brilliant, smart people around you, What would you change? You know, what would you make better?
[00:27:38] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Apart from, stopping war in the world.
[00:27:40] Jenny Ousbey: Oh yeah, apart from that, well you could solve that in a couple of days, so that's fine, Hans.
[00:27:45] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: But I promised my family not to go into new projects. So, so what, whatever I do, I have to do within Be My Eyes. But one of the things that I dream about is if we can make Be My Eyes also into a way where blind people can teach each other in Denmark, in UK, in the U.S., in Australia, New Zealand and many other countries, we have good support systems, we have schools for the blind, we have mobility instructors and all that. But in many other countries, there is a very, few resources that are actually available for a blind person. So we would love to facilitate a platform where you can offer to help other blind people learn braille and learn some skills you need and learn to navigate your smartphone and so on and that is kind of what I dream about adding to the Be My Eyes system, so to speak. But it's kind of a long haul, but that's what I dream about.
[00:28:57] Jenny Ousbey: Brilliant. Well, I'm sure you'll make it happen. Thinking beyond the sight loss community, and we've talked about the power of the community created by Be My Eyes. We've talked about the power of Micro Volunteering, you know, AI Technology, Innovation, thinking about all of those things, are there any other areas of healthcare that you think could benefit? So could take some of the learnings, some of those secret sauce ingredients and apply them to improving things. So for example, you know, a very common topic in healthcare systems at the moment is about how patients can get faster access to medicines or diagnosis or treatment or improving the type of conversations they have with their clinicians. It could be lots of different things. So I'm interested to think about how can we apply the successes of Be My Eyes into other areas.
[00:29:58] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, it's still early days with AI, but I feel that it will be capable of having a very meaningful, you can argue if it is a conversation, but if you as the human part of it, if you feel that you are talking to a computer who understands you and is able to ask the right questions and then you can after that maybe you can talk to your doctor and then you are prepared on a whole new level and the doctor can be prepared on a whole new level because you have been through some session to narrow down what are we actually talking about here. I'm super happy that I'm not a school teacher because I think it is really difficult these days to get a good teaching session going on. There is so much noise and distraction and so on and I'm not sure how, but I really hope that we can use the power of AI to basically do the same thing that students can with some of the more boring stuff and so on, make that interaction where the AI is asking questions on your level and try to level you up all the time and so you can have this individual session and then you, of course, I mean, it's super, super important that you have one on one time and also class group time with your teacher and so on. But I think that is a place where people or maybe some kids who are not really comfortable or have anxious or whatever, they can go into a separate room and still be a part of the class and so on. I think there are some really powerful things that AI can do and that is just really interesting because it can do so much and it can sort of understand what's going on, so yeah.
[00:32:16] Jenny Ousbey: Oh, absolutely and I think that, you know, I have a seven year old in school today and I think that, you know, what she will have in terms of AI and technology to help power that learning, I probably can't even quite imagine it just yet. But I think that you're right and I think, you know, going back to what you were saying around the patient-doctor conversations is also really interesting and there's a phrase in healthcare communications, which is the door handle conversation. So the thing that the patient mentions as they're leaving the doctor's room, when they've got their hand on the door handle, is the most important thing that they're going say. Exactly, exactly, because that's the thing that they haven't quite been able to say, but they're going to say it leaving the room. So I think something that can capture that more intelligently and effectively, I think, is really interesting and what about, you've had Be My Eyes since 2015, what keeps you going? So what keeps you wanting to be driven, to keep expanding the community, expanding those partnerships? Is it the individual stories of the people who that app?
[00:33:24] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: I am so lucky that I am the one who gets all the emails from our users and our volunteers together with some of my staff. Before I even get out of bed, I can read two or three stories about how people are using Be My Eyes and how grateful they are for being able to use Be My Eyes for free, and so on and that is all I need...
[00:33:52] Jenny Ousbey: Yeah.
[00:33:53] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: ...to motivate me, and I am very proud when sometimes we share the stories with the team. And right now we are in a campaign called Can You Top This? Where we ask people to, yeah, send us emails about how they are using Be My Eyes and then we will give a small prize once a month, I think, to some of the best stories or something like that and that's, I have not been part of that, but that is how we believe we can share some of the amazing stories we get to read and we think that the other people should have access to as well. But on a daily basis, seeing that what you created is actually helping people out there, that's extremely motivating. So, yeah.
[00:34:43] Jenny Ousbey: That's better than a morning coffee or the best breakfast in the world. You get that fuel every morning. I think a lot of people would want that, you should be paying them for sending you the emails, Hans, because that's fantastic and outside of that, monthly competition that you're running, are there any stories or emails that have really stood out for you over the years that have particularly, you know, got you out of bed in the morning with a spring in your step?
[00:35:10] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, there is a number of stories. I remember one guy in the U.S., he was roasting coffee beans, and he was using Be My Eyes to make sure that he was taking the right bag of beans and so on. He's actually having a small business where Be My Eyes was playing a little part of him being able to run that business and I was very excited about that and another story was, which was kind of a funny one because there was also a U.S. person. He called and, he got help with something and then the volunteer said, I wish you could help me because I can't get my car to start and then the blind guy said, Oh, I'm actually a mechanic. Maybe we can do that and they went out there and, and she was opening the hood and, I don't know what, but they got the car running and that was, yeah. So sometimes it's, not a one way street and yeah, that was kind of a, yeah, a funny story to tell as well. So...
[00:36:17] Jenny Ousbey: I love that one. Final question. We talk about Change Makers. We talk about trying to make an impact. What for you, because there are lots of different ways in which we can define what does it mean to be a Change Maker. So in your own words, what do you think it means to be a Change Maker?
[00:36:37] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Well, first of all, everybody is a Change Maker, maybe not on a global scale, but you can be a change maker just by serving coffee for your wife or something like that because that can really make a change in another person's life that they feel that somebody really loved them and so don't think that you are not a Change Maker just because you haven't changed anything out there and I think that's maybe the most important thing. But of course, I have more or less by accident become a Change Maker as well and I'm super, super proud of that and I hope that people can be inspired and think okay, if this non tech blind guy from Denmark, he can do this, then I can also be a Change Maker, and then, hopefully go at it. So, you know, I hope that I can, in that way, inspire more to be a Change Maker on a more grand scale, sort of thing.
[00:37:37] Jenny Ousbey: Brilliant, thank you. Well, you've been my morning coffee, so my morning fuel today, so thank you.
[00:37:42] Hans Jørgen Wiberg: Thank you so much.
[00:37:44] Jenny Ousbey: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Health Change Maker podcast. If you enjoyed it, why not share with a friend and subscribe so you never miss an episode.