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23 Feb 2025
How AI and new technologies revolutionise my ability to work and study
7:38 pm on 23 February 2025
By Eleanor Beidatsch, ABC
Eleanor Beidatsch is an ABC journalist based in Albany.
Photo: ABC / Andrew Chounding
When I was a baby, the doctors told my parents I would die by the time I was two years old.
I was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy or SMA type 1, an incurable genetic condition that causes profound muscle weakness and difficulty breathing.
This came as a devastating shock to my parents, and it started my mum on a quest to learn everything she could about my condition and find a way to prevent it from killing me.
She was successful and now I’m a 31-year-old ABC journalist and palaeontology master’s student at the University of New England.
So, hats off to mum, she did a good job.
Technological advances
Growing up with a profound physical disability in the 1990s wasn’t easy though, especially when it came to education.
I can’t move my hands [...]