SBIR-STTR Award

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve the access of people with disabilities to the growing ecosystem of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, thus improving their ability to be independent, connect with others, seek and retain education and employment, and contribute to society both economically and socially. In particular, nearly 20 million US citizens live with disabilities affecting upper limb movement, thus impacting their ability to configure and control devices around the home. This project aims to develop an open platform that allows these consumers customized control of their home devices, using assistive input controls such as adaptive joysticks, sip-and-puff inputs, chin switches, or eye gaze, as well as off-the-shelf consumer input devices such as trackpads or mice.The proposed project would advance the consumer Internet of Things (IoT) landscape by enabling end user programmability for IoT applications, giving end users (non-programmers) the ability to modify, control, and automate their devices and services. Our system will draw on a newly patented device control architecture with novel customizability and intuitive access to non-programmers. The use cases supported by the platform would previously have required engineers to spend days or weeks of dedicated time building custom solutions for users; instead, the platform will make these use cases available to non-technical users on a wide scale without requiring custom engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project improves assistive devices for people with disabilities (PwD). The assistive technology industry is projected to reach $2.4 billion in 2022, and the home rehabilitation market is expected to exceed $225 billion globally by 2027. This project advances a novel hardware and software platform to give PwD full control of consumer products, including game consoles, smart home devices, drones, and business and design software. The system builds on a novel end-user development (EUD) architecture which supports applications in accessibility, IoT, gaming, physical therapy, industrial automation, and other domains involving user-controlled electronic systems. The initial application will be for children with cerebral palsy (CP) ages 5-18, but later applications include adults with physical disabilities, and the aging population. This will reduce time and resources needed for PwD to overcome access barriers, thus creating new opportunities for socialization, education, entertainment, employment, and independence. The intellectual merit of this project is to advance a system to support plug-and-play device compatibility, with developer feedback indicating over an order of magnitude improvement on the state-of-the-art (45 times faster) for implementing accessibility use cases. This project will support the research and design of a visual user interface for non-technical users to enable them to easily configure their devices for everyday applications, as well as a visual editor to allow hobbyists and engineers to implement more demanding accessibility use cases, under guidance from user feedback at a school for children with CP in collaboration with clinical and user experience (UX) researchers. The system is anticipated to achieve over two orders of magnitude improvement in development time (up to 250 times faster) for accessibility use cases compared to existing alternatives.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.