The origin story of NODA AI begins not in a lab, not in a boardroom, but in the chaos of a two-year-old’s bedroom at 2am — and a healthcare system that had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
There’s a moment every autism parent remembers. Not the diagnosis — that comes later, bureaucratically, almost anticlimactically. The moment I’m talking about is earlier. It’s the moment you look at your child and think: something is different. Something changed. And I have no idea what just happened to my kid.
For Sharon and me, that moment arrived sometime between Robby’s first and second birthday – in a suburb of Dallas, TX in early 1994.
At fifteen months, Robby was doing what babies do. He had words — not a lot, but some. He smiled. He made eye contact. He had this specific laugh that could stop a room. He was, by any measure, a kid with joy in him.
And then, quietly, inexplicably and insidiously — he started going somewhere else.
The Boy Under the Crib
By the time Robby turned two years old, our house had a new normal, and none of it made sense.
He’d taken to hiding under his crib. Not playing — hiding. Curled up in that tight dark rectangle like it was the only safe place in a world that had become overwhelming in ways he couldn’t tell us.
A fire truck could scream past our house at full wail — lights, horn, the works — and Robby wouldn’t flinch. He’d be staring at a rock on the front lawn, completely absorbed, as if the rock were broadcasting something only he could hear. He could do this for an hour. Maybe two.
But then Sharon would whisper something to me from across the kitchen — not even to Robby, just a quiet word between spouses — and he’d completely lose it. Full meltdown. As if she’d detonated something.
He’d wander toward the street at a moment’s notice, and just did not hear or care about the ‘No!’ imperative I yelled to avoid . He’d pull every last ounce of soil out of our indoor plants and then study the pile like a geologist. He cried — not the crying of a kid who wants something, but the crying of a kid who can’t explain why everything hurts.
And Sharon and I? We started doing something that, looking back, was completely predictable and completely useless: we started disagreeing about what we were seeing.
The World’s Least Productive Disagreement
Here’s the thing about watching your child struggle in real time: your brain desperately wants a story that makes it okay. So Sharon would observe Robby doing something alarming, and she’d file it one way. I’d observe the same behavior an hour later, and I’d file it completely differently. We weren’t lying to each other — we were each telling ourselves the version we could tolerate.
By the time we finally got our fifteen minutes with our Princeton pediatrician, we walked in with two entirely different accounts of the same child.
The pediatrician was kind. He listened. He referred us to audiology because, he explained, it was important to rule out hearing loss — which, if you’ve ever watched your child completely ignore a fire truck and then spin around at a whisper, is a referral that makes you feel like everyone is missing something obvious.
Audiology confirmed his hearing was fine. Which it was. Which we knew.
Then came Early Intervention — a county specialist who came to the house once a month. Once. A month.
We were grateful. We were also watching our son disappear in real time, and once a month felt like getting a single sandbag to fight a flood.
The Diagnosis: Medically Sophisticated It Was Not
Eventually, after enough referrals and enough waiting rooms and enough fifteen-minute appointments, we got to the evaluation that would give us a diagnosis.
I want to be fair here. The clinicians were caring people doing the best they could within a system a system built long before anyone understood what they were actually dealing with, and had inadequate tools to work with.
There were tape measures involved. Literally — tape measures, measuring Robby’s calf circumference and head circumference as part of the assessment battery. I’m a guy who’d spent his career in medical devices. I had watched cardiovascular surgeons guide catheters through beating hearts using real-time imaging. I had seen diagnostic tools that could quantify, objectively, what was happening inside a human body with a precision that felt like science fiction (and this was the 1990’s).
And here we were, measuring our son’s calves.
Part of the problem was the language. Autism evaluations rely on clinical descriptors — terms like “restricted and repetitive behaviors,” “deficits in social reciprocal interaction,” “sensory processing atypicality” — that are accurate but completely disconnected from what we’d actually been living. We’d spent eighteen months watching specific behaviors in specific contexts at specific times of day, and when the evaluation came, we couldn’t translate what we knew into what they needed to hear. We had the data. We just had no way to share it.
We left with a diagnosis, a folder of resources, and a child who was still hiding under his crib.
Meanwhile, in the Jungle of Honduras
A year or two before Robby’s regression began, Sharon and I had done something that, in retrospect, was quietly going to change everything.
We’d traveled to Honduras with Operation Smile — the extraordinary organization that provides free reconstructive surgery to children born with cleft lips and palates in countries where access to care is otherwise a dream. Our role was logistical, helping facilitate the flow of families through a makeshift surgical facility set up in a region where the nearest hospital was hours away.
What I saw there genuinely stunned me: the diagnostic imaging, the surgical support tools, the remote monitoring capabilities — they were extraordinary. Real, functional, sophisticated medical technology deployed in the middle of nowhere, transforming outcomes for kids who had no other options. Kids in a Honduran jungle were receiving diagnostic workups that would have been impressive in a major U.S. medical center.
I came home to Princeton, New Jersey — a wealthy university town with excellent schools and easy access to top-tier medical centers — and found myself trying to access care for my struggling three-year-old that was less sophisticated, in critical ways, than what I’d seen set up under a tent in Central America.
That particular cognitive dissonance never fully left me.
The Hack That Planted the Seed
Out of necessity, we started getting creative.
My background in medical devices had taught me one thing above all else: the gap between what technology could do and what medicine was actually using is enormous, and that gap is where opportunity lives. We started experimenting — using video, using remote observation tools, using whatever we could cobble together — to give Robby’s treatment team a better window into what was actually happening in our home between their visits.
It was clunky. It was improvised. It was, in the most literal sense of the word, a hack.
But it worked better than anything the system had offered us.
And that — right there, in that messy improvised space between desperation and ingenuity — was where the idea for Behavior Imaging, and in a similar way, NODA was born.
We didn’t know it yet. We were just trying to keep our family sane and help our son. But somewhere in the gap between a fifteen-minute pediatrician appointment and a Honduran surgical suite on an airplane, a question had taken root:
What if there was a better way to capture what families were seeing — and get it into the hands of the people who could actually help?
That question is going to take us somewhere interesting.
Next up — Post 2: If Radiologists Can Do It, Why Can’t We?
This is Part 1 of a 6-part series — “The NODA AI Story: A Family’s Journey from Crisis to Breakthrough.” Read the full series at [link]