After the basketball tournament I came back to my first assignment: photograph Maggie Fields using an eye tracking system to communicate. The day was pretty open so I was able to spend more than two hours with the precocious youngster during speech, occupational, and physical therapy. She has an infectious personality, great big smile and brigth blue eyes.  You can’t visit her without smiling.

Maggie, 4, choked on a bug when she was eight months old, cutting off oxygen to her brain.  The result was various therapies to help her re-learn everything.  But communication was tough.  Last September Maggie started using the DynaVox Vmax with EyeMax system.  The system has a camera that tracks her eye movement.  When she holds her gaze over an icon it speaks the word for her. As Mark Coddington said in the story: “It’s opened up a whole new world of communication and personality that even her family members had never seen — all through those huge, bright blue eyes.”