Brief description:
Developed by Paperbox Health, DINO uses short interactive mini-games to generate structured early-risk signals that may support earlier educational intervention without acting as a diagnostic tool, while through the Evolve2Care programme led by the European Network of Living Labs, GoodTech Living Lab serves as an independent validation partner, contributing to methodology design, ethical governance, stakeholder engagement, and evidence generation.
Most children with dyslexia in UK schools are identified in Year 3 or later.
By that point, three or four years of difficulty have already accumulated — academic gaps, reduced confidence, and in too many cases, a child who has quietly concluded they are “not clever.”
The evidence on this is clear. The window for highest-impact early intervention is ages 5–7 — precisely the years when most schools still rely on teacher observation, paper checklists, and waiting lists for specialist support.
This is not a failure of teachers. It is a structural gap: no accessible, game-based, multi-parametric digital screener exists for whole-class use at this age — one that is fast enough for a busy classroom, non-threatening enough for a five-year-old, and evidence-backed enough for a SENCO to trust.
DINO is a serious attempt to fill that gap. And we are validating whether it works.
What is DINO?
DINO is an AI-powered, gamified educational screening-support tool developed by Paperbox Health (Italy). It is designed for children aged 5–7 and takes approximately 15 minutes — three short mini-games covering visual-spatial, phonological, and audio-verbal domains.
It does not diagnose dyslexia or any other learning disorder.
It produces a risk index — a structured signal to educators that a particular child may benefit from closer attention or specialist referral. The results are always interpreted by
a teacher, SENCO, or caregiver. The tool never acts autonomously.
This distinction matters enormously. In a landscape where diagnostic overclaiming is a persistent risk in EdTech, DINO’s non-clinical positioning is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation.
What is DINO?
DINO is an AI-powered, gamified educational screening-support tool developed by Paperbox Health (Italy). It is designed for children aged 5–7 and takes approximately 15 minutes — three short mini-games covering visual-spatial, phonological, and audio-verbal domains.
It does not diagnose dyslexia or any other learning disorder.
It produces a risk index — a structured signal to educators that a particular child may benefit from closer attention or specialist referral. The results are always interpreted by
a teacher, SENCO, or caregiver. The tool never acts autonomously.
This distinction matters enormously. In a landscape where diagnostic overclaiming is a persistent risk in EdTech, DINO’s non-clinical positioning is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation.
Why is GoodTech involved?
GoodTech Living Lab is an ENoLL Adherent Member and a Digital Innovation Zone EDIH partner. Our role in this collaboration is strictly that of an independent validation authority — not a product developer, not a commercial partner, and not a clinical evaluator.
We were selected as the external validation partner for DINO through the Evolve2Care programme, an open call by
the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) designed to support rigorous, ethics-first validation of health and care innovations.
Our mandate is specific:
- Design and govern the validation methodology
- Ensure ethical safeguards for child participation (GDPR, child protection, psychological safety)
- Co-create and validate the instruments used with educators, parents, and specialists
- Produce an independent Living Lab validation report that Paperbox can present to schools, investors, and regulators
We do not influence the product. We do not interact with children directly. We do not make clinical judgements.
What we do is ensure that the evidence generated is defensible, methodologically sound, and ethically clean — the kind of evidence that carries weight with an Ofsted inspector, a school governor, or a venture funder.
What the UK evidence already shows
Before this validation phase began, DINO’s team had already done substantial work in the UK:
Over 650 children across two schools in the Birmingham area have participated in DINO sessions — making this one of the largest UK-embedded EdTech pilots in the early dyslexia-risk identification space from a non-UK entrant.
The collaboration with the University of Warwick’s ABSPIE Lab (Applied Biomedical Signal Processing Intelligent eHealth) has been active since 2023. Dr. Davide Piaggio from Warwick’s School of Engineering serves as an external academic advisor to Paperbox, providing independent scientific grounding for DINO’s methodology.
In January 2026, a peer-reviewed systematic literature review co-authored by Warwick researchers and the Paperbox team was published in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology (PMID: 41613152). The paper maps the current evidence landscape on serious games and eye-tracking for neurodevelopmental disorder screening in children — and positions DINO within that scientific conversation.
DINO’s usability has also been recalibrated with SEND specialist input — a step that no equivalent UK tool has publicly documented. This makes it one of the few tools in this space explicitly adapted for UK SEND Code of Practice contexts.
How does DINO compare to existing UK tools?
The UK market has three main players: Nessy (game-based screener, strong brand recognition, primarily phonological), GL Assessment’s Lucid Rapid (computer-based, standardised UK norms), and Lexplore (AI + eye-tracking, focused on reading fluency, webcam-based, launched a new online version in September 2025).
Each is valuable. Each is also limited in different ways.
Nessy and GL Assessment operate on single or dual-domain assessments — primarily phonological awareness and reading skills. Lexplore’s technology is impressive but optimised for reading fluency analysis rather than early multi-domain risk identification at ages 5–7.
DINO’s differentiation is not that it replaces any of these tools. It is that it covers more ground, earlier, in less time, at lower cost — and does so in a format that is genuinely engaging for young children who have not yet developed test anxiety or reading-specific avoidance behaviours.
Five times faster than standard methods. Approximately half the cost. Run by a teacher without specialist training.
These are not marketing claims — they come from the data collected at Storywood and Yenton schools, the first UK pilot sites.
Why Living Lab validation matter beyond the product
The DINO pilot sits within a larger question that GoodTech Living Lab works on across multiple projects:
How do we generate trustworthy, ethical evidence for AI tools that interact with children — evidence that is rigorous enough for regulators, honest enough for parents, and useful enough for teachers?
The UK SEND crisis is partly a data crisis. Too many children wait too long because too little validated, accessible evidence reaches the professionals who could act on it. Living Lab methodology — co-designed instruments, independent validation, GDPR-governed data, transparent reporting — offers a model for how that evidence can be generated responsibly.
DINO is one test of that model. The methodology will be reusable. Whatever the findings show — positive, mixed, or limitations-forward — the validation report will be an honest account of what the tool does and does not do for UK children and educators.
That, in our view, is what good evidence looks like.
Is your school, foundation, or network interested in this project?
Contact us directly:
📧 miriam.ferreira@paperbox.health
Or visit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41613152/ to read the Warwick co-publication.
GoodTech Living Lab is an ENoLL Adherent Member and Digital Innovation Zone EDIH partner.
This validation is conducted under the Evolve2Care programme. DINO is a non-clinical, non-diagnostic educational screening-support tool.