Vancouver’s Leafi Home Turns Ordinary Blinds Into Smart Blinds in Under a Minute

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A Vancouver startup has built a device that turns ordinary window blinds into smart blinds in under a minute, with no tools and no need to take the existing blinds down — and it found its accessibility audience almost by accident.

Leafi Home launched its first product, Nova, at CES in Las Vegas, where co-founder Will Wang joined Double Tap’s Steven Scott and Marc Aflalo on our AMI-tv sister show Access Tech Live from the show floor.

“We’re really trying to solve the problem about sunlight and privacy control in homes and buildings,” Wang said. “This solution can transform any ordinary window blinds into smart blinds, within less than a minute, and without any tools.”

The reaction on the CES floor, he said, was consistent. “A lot of people know about smart window blinds, but when we showed them the installation, everybody was like, ‘What? Is that done?’”

It started with a newborn and a town house

Wang did not set out to build assistive technology. He set out to solve a problem in his own home.

“My son was born, my wife was holding the newborn baby, walking around the town house, opening and closing all the window blinds, one by one, every day,” he said. “And we have like smart this, smart that at home, so I was like, oh, this could be better.”

As an engineer, he built a prototype, mainly because the smart blinds already on the market were expensive and hard to install. Then he started showing it to friends.

“One of my friends, he’s in a wheelchair, and he’s part of Technology for Living, so that’s how I realised, for somebody who couldn’t get up and reach the window blinds, this is a day and night difference for them,” Wang said. “I got even more passionate, because this innovation could help a lot more people.”

Leafi now partners with Technology for Living, the British Columbia organisation that supports people with severe physical disabilities to live independently.

Accidental accessibility

Steven Scott put it to Wang that Nova belongs to a growing category of products that arrive at accessibility sideways — built for one reason, useful for quite another.

“I’m blind, and I’ve got friends of mine as well who are blind who don’t even know if it’s dark outside or not,” Steven said. “They have their blinds open and they want to have them closed, but they don’t know the right time to do it.”

Wang had heard the same thing in his own user research. One woman he interviewed was blind and had visitors regularly. “When the guests came over, they opened the blinds, but guess what, sometimes they forgot to close it when they leave, and then that’s a big privacy concern.”

How it installs

The device is roughly half the length of a smartphone and about as thick as a computer mouse. The bracket fastens like a zip tie around the existing blind mechanism once the manual stick is removed, and the unit slides on. It charges over USB-C and the battery lasts about a year in typical use.

Asked whether a blind user with no DIY confidence could fit it unaided, Wang was blunt: “My five-year-old son can do it even without looking at any user manuals or videos.” The company worked with a product development firm in the Bay Area on the mechanical design specifically to keep the installation to about 30 seconds.

Leafi has also prototyped integration with Ecobee thermostats, so blinds can close against solar heat when the air conditioning is running and open again for natural light when the sun moves off that side of the house.

“My vision is, I wanna automate sunlight to make the world a more efficient place,” Wang said.

Resources

• Leafi Home: leafihome.com
• Technology for Living: technologyforliving.org