SBIR Phase II: Open Hardware and Software Platform to Enable Control of IoT Devices for People with Disabilities

Award ID: 2136794

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.

NSF Program Director: Benaiah Schrag