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ZVERLOFF, 23, WHO TEACHES students with multiple disabilities at a school near Akron, Ohio, vented her exasperation one night in early 2001 to her fiance, Eric Van Raepenbusch, 25. Van Raepenbusch, who teaches children with learning disabilities, also happens to be a shareholder in Xybernaut Corp., a Fairfax company that makes wearable computers.
“He said, like a smart-alecky comment, ‘Why don’t you just call Xybernaut?’ ” Zverloff said. “I thought, ‘There’s a challenge.’ ”
The next day, Zverloff called Xybernaut’s sales department. Unsure what it could do for her, the struggling company offered her what was then the lastest version of its computer. The device is a two-pound combination of software and hardware, including a head-mounted or flat-panel display, designed to be worn by field workers such as cable, telephone line and antenna technicians.
Zverloff arranged a 90-day trial period in which she taught Jeremy how to use the monitor’s on-screen keyboard to send messages.
It worked. No longer anchored to a stationary computer, Jeremy could order his own food and perform other simple tasks without people having to guess what he wanted. The keyboard and tablet allow students to control and initiate communication, the teachers said.
“It’s totally changed Jeremy’s life; he’s a communicator,” Zverloff said. “The wearable computer allows him to do silly little things that are no big deal to most people but are a huge deal to him.”
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| A Xybernaut wearable computer helped student Kevin MIller overcome communication problems caused by cerebral palsy.
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A NEW MARKET IS BORN
Zverloff, Van Raepenbusch and colleague Celeste Powell repeated the success with another student, Kevin, an 11-year-old with cerebral palsy. And so a smart teacher and a penny-pinching school district in northeast Ohio may have also changed the fortunes of Northern Virginia’s Xybernaut, whose wearable computers have drawn plenty of attention but not so much revenue.
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“While we didn’t originally look upon this as a business opportunity, it became clear that it was,” said Steven A. Newman, Xybernaut’s vice chairman.
Never profitable since it was founded in 1990, Xybernaut has spent roughly $104.4 million more than it has made through 2001, according to its latest annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Its stock, which went public in 1996, has steadily fallen, from $6.56 per share a year ago to as low as 77 cents last week. It closed yesterday at $1.08.
Xybernaut reported yesterday that it posted a loss of $8 million (13 cents per share) on revenue of $2.8 million for the three months ended March 31. That compared with a loss of $5.9 million (13 cents) on $2.3 million in revenue for the same quarter last year.
Xybernaut plans to cut costs by as much as 50 percent after spending $33.6 million in 2001. Newman said the company will lay off 20 to 40 of its 145 workers. And it needs more funding.
Through last quarter, Xybernaut said, it sold more than 3,500 units of its Mobile Assistant series, booking more than $17 million in sales since 1998. The company hopes the special-education market can significantly increase those sales, but education professionals warn that implementing such technology will be difficult.
Nationwide, there were almost 47 million K-12 students in public schools during the 1999-2000 school year, according to the federal Department of Education, and an estimated 6 million are enrolled in special education.
After looking at those numbers, Xybernaut created XyberKids, an eight-person unit, last October. Although executives declined to forecast revenue from the new business unit, they have high expectations.
The XyberKids kit, at $5,000, is based on the latest version of Xybernaut’s wearable computer. The one-pound, 500-megahertz central processing unit, with a five-gigabyte hard drive. An 8.4-inch, touch-screen monitor connects by wire to the CPU, which tucks away inside a backpack styled after a jury-rigged bag that Zverloff and Van Raepenbusch made for Jeremy.
HURDLES TO OVERCOME
Still, anything cutting-edge like a wearable computer faces major obstacles to becoming a regular assistive device in the classroom, said Donna Waghorn, assistant director of the District-based National Information Center for Children and Youth with Disabilities. Most school districts don’t even have the money or personnel to devote to traditional assistive technology, she said.
“We’re slowly getting things into the classroom such as communication devices,” Waghorn said. But she said that adding wearable computers to a school’s curriculum “would certainly be tough to accomplish,” because of the high cost of the technology.
But Zverloff and Van Raepenbusch once again have offered a possible solution. They have landed more than $50,000 in grants, in part by qualifying the wearable computers as assistive technology in Ohio. A federally funded project under the state’s Division of Special Education is providing for seven students to receive the XyberKids kit, and the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation pitched in $13,000.
Meanwhile, Zverloff and Van Raepenbusch have started their own consulting firm, IT-Clicks.net, and have loaded their Web site with information on wearable computers and disabled students, and applying for grants.
Zverloff and Van Raepenbusch, who plan to marry in December, do not profit from Xybernaut’s sales. The company does not pay them, and the schools have bought the computers they are using. Van Raepenbusch remains a Xybernaut shareholder.
Mike Woods, who is principal at the middle school where Zverloff works and who has a disabled daughter, is amazed by Zverloff and Van Raepenbusch’s achievements. He expects, and fears, their careers will lead them away from the classroom.
“These are probably the most caring and innovative teachers I have ever met,” Woods said.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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