D3. Silver Skill-IT Mobile and Voice Activated App Factory
Principal Investigator
Jon Sanford, M.Arch.
Partners
Amazon, Inc., Anthem, Inc., Microsoft.
Overview
For individuals with long-term disabilities, age-related changes can create additional challenges with daily activities that can make independent living extremely difficult. New technologies, such as smart phones and voice-activated assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa), have enormous, yet untapped potential to facilitate independence in home and community activities. The people who could benefit most from these technologies often have most difficulty using them; operational tasks such as hearing voice assistants, seeing digital interfaces, speaking clearly, or hitting small touch buttons can create barriers to use for people with sensory and mobility limitations. To overcome these challenges, this project will develop new, universal design mobile and voice-activated software applications to support people aging-in-place with long-term disabilities. Annual design competitions will be held to identify innovative and commercially viable applications that have the potential to improve the lives of people aging with long-term disabilities. Winning applications will be offered additional resources by our competition sponsors, Amazon, Microsoft and Anthem, to develop prototypes and assist with commercialization.