How Google Glass and other devices are being tested to teach children on the autism spectrum to make eye contact and recognize emotions
and this is a wonderful example.] Google Glass May Have an Afterlife as a Device to Teach Autistic Children - https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Michelle Manafy / @michellemanafy : Google Glass May Have an Afterlife as a Device to Teach Autistic Children | Privacy concerns caused the computerized eyewear to fail with the general public. But researchers believe it could help autistic children recognize emotion and make eye contact. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Pui-Wing Tam / @puiwingtam : In a season where tech can do no right, here's a tale of a device that did no right - Google Glass - that is now maybe, just maybe, serving a useful and hopeful purpose. @CadeMetz https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Glass arrived as a consumer product and collapsed under privacy backlash — by January 2015 the Explorer Program was shut down and production of the original device ended as Glass moved into an independent division under Tony Fadell [[a:825495]]. What followed was a quiet search for a second life outside the consumer market.
This story documents one branch of that search: researchers testing Glass to teach autistic children eye contact and emotion recognition. It sits alongside earlier assistive-tech moves in the same space — Samsung's Look At Me Android app for training autistic children in eye contact — and the enterprise repurposing where Augmedix raised tens of millions to put Glass on hundreds of doctors' faces for medical scribing [[a:875373]].
First-order effects
- Autistic children and their therapists gain a wearable that delivers real-time social cues during natural interaction — a format smartphone-based tools like Look At Me cannot replicate because it keeps the child's eyes on the person, not a screen.
- Researchers working on autism intervention get a validated hardware platform for a device Google had already abandoned commercially, decoupling the science from the product's market fate.
Second-order effects
- The Augmedix playbook repeats in a second vertical: hardware written off for consumers finds paying customers in clinics rather than offices, giving Google a reason to keep the enterprise/clinical supply line alive even without retail demand.
- Samsung and other device makers face pressure to treat accessibility as a design constraint from launch rather than an afterthought, since purpose-built apps like Look At Me show demand exists when the interface fits the user.
Third-order effects
- If wearables keep proving their value only in supervised, consented settings — hospitals, therapy centers, and dedicated test sites like the Georgia center for young people with disabilities used by Google and others [[a:961529]] — the industry's path for always-on cameras may run through institutions that can manage the privacy concerns, not through consumers who could not.
- Clinical validation becomes the gatekeeper for repurposed consumer hardware: the same privacy sensitivity that killed Glass in public pushes its successors toward regulated, evidence-backed deployments where effectiveness data, not fashion, drives adoption.
The trend: Consumer-failed wearables are being rehabilitated as institutional tools — enterprise scribing, autism therapy, accessibility testing — shifting the market from mass adoption to validated niche deployment.