HapWare's announcement of its recognition in TIME magazine's Best Inventions of 2026 is dated October 19, 2026. HapWare said it was introducing ALEYE in the United States, including at organizations such as the Braille Institute of America and the Society for the Blind, as well as through a growing network of assistive technology retailers. Michael, a beta tester featured in the announcement, said he had forgotten what it was like to read other people's facial expressions but now felt involved in conversations again.
How it works and the company's development
According to the company, ALEYE connects to Meta smart glasses or a smartphone camera, recognizes facial expressions, gestures and body language, and translates these signals into different vibration patterns on the wrist. A smile is thus said to feel like a U-shape traced across the wrist, and a wave like a vibration moving from side to side. According to a Colorado School of Mines report dated November 6, 2026, CEO and co-founder Jack Walters and blind haptics researcher Bryan Duarte founded the company in 2025. According to the university, the company grew out of a student project in which Duarte, who is blind, served as the client for Walters' student team.
As early as the beginning of January 2026, the CTA Foundation had, according to its own account, named HapWare the winner of the 2026 Health Innovation Challenge, with the company Lotus as runner-up. According to the portal Ability Central, the win came with $25,000 in prize money. The TIME recognition was announced alongside a $1.5 million pre-seed funding round that the company said was oversubscribed, led by Adaptation Ventures, with participation from Sidecut Ventures, Mines Venture Fund, Avesta Fund and The Pitch Fund. Walters said customers reported that ALEYE helped them with conversations at work, recognizing a wave or a loved one's smile, and feeling more independent. The university itself holds a stake in HapWare through Mines Venture Fund II, its platform for early-stage financing; according to a Colorado School of Mines report dated October 22, 2026, $250,000 from this fund went into the company.
Preorders ahead of the 2027 launch
According to HapWare, interested customers can preorder ALEYE with a fully refundable deposit of $59, which will be credited toward the $359 price. The deposit is intended to secure a place among the first recipients. According to the November 11, 2026 episode of the Double Tap podcast, the first batch is now planned to consist of 500 units, with the launch targeted for around May 2027. The subscription would reportedly cost $20 per month or $199 per year. As recently as October, Walters had quoted a price range of 19 to 29 U.S. dollars per month on the The Pitch podcast. According to his own account, all customers at that point were preordering at the highest rate of $29.
For comparison: What a similar system had achieved
The study by Buimer and colleagues on conveying facial expressions using a camera-and-belt system involved 10 blind and visually impaired participants and 10 sighted participants, who were shown images and videos of facial expressions. Among the blind and visually impaired participants, accuracy in correctly identifying specified facial expressions rose from an average of 35.0±2.5% without assistance to 79.4±2.1% with the device. The researchers excluded stimuli that their FaceReader 6 software had not correctly recognized beforehand. They noted that further testing and development were needed for everyday use. A co-author of the study was also employed by VicarVision, which had developed the FaceReader software used; according to the authors, apart from this co-author's salary, the company had no further influence on the study design, data collection, analysis or publication. A benchmark study by Salas-Cáceres and colleagues, published in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence in 2026, shows how large the difference between controlled and more realistic test conditions can be for such technology. On controlled, static images, the facial expression recognition systems tested achieved an average recall of around 72%. The commercial software FaceReader, now in version 10, performed excellently under ideal conditions but fell below the accuracy of a random classifier on one of the dynamic datasets.
Additional devices and questions about data use
According to Ability Central on February 10, 2026, the companion app required at least an iPhone 13 running iOS 17 or later, as well as a Meta AI account. The enabled.in product guide also points out that lighting, camera angles, skin tone, disability-related facial differences and cultural differences can affect recognition. It advises against using ALEYE feedback as the sole basis for safety-critical, professional, legal, medical or financial decisions. The guide calls for users to understand when image data involving conversation partners is processed or stored and who has access to it. For deafblind users with their own forms of communication, the guide considers an individual compatibility assessment necessary.