Technology that supports the lifestyles of people with disabilities is becoming increasingly sophisticated, but there’s plenty of room for growth. And one of the keys for improving assistive tech is a simple but often overlooked philosophy: working with those who will use the product from the very start.
To support emerging designers helping to improve mobility, accessibility, and daily life for people living with multiple sclerosis, Novartis recently launched the Innovation Prize for Assistive Tech. Specialist tech and accessibility judges from Sequoia, Airbnb and Whill as well as patient experts from Shift.ms, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and people living with MS evaluated exciting innovations from around the world. “We focused on patient-centered innovation because, as a company, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand how we can be a catalyst for technology that is created by and for the MS community,” says Marie-France Tschudin, President of Novartis Pharmaceuticals. Among a huge diversity of entries including lifestyle brands, apps, and hardware, the judges were impressed by innovations that deeply addressed what MS patients have been saying for years: that the daily challenges of mobility and accessibility were just as important to them as what occurred in the doctor’s office. “While innovation can take many different forms, all the designs were approached on behalf of the communities and with the patient in mind,” Tschudin says. The judges panel ultimately awarded first prize to Maayan Ziv, creator of the crowdsourced accessibility app AccessNow, and second prize to David Hojah, creator of Parrot, a socially assistive robot. These two visionary creators are rethinking the way accessibility tech is approached from all angles.
Maayan Ziv points out that some of the best designs that many of us take for granted these days—electric toothbrushes, audible crosswalk signals, closed captioning—were first created expressly for physical or sensory disabilities. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which AccessNow is just as ubiquitous. The app allows users to rate businesses and other specific locations based on elements like how accessible the washroom is, whether or not it’s service animal friendly, and if it’s spacious enough to navigate with a wheelchair. Even more importantly, AccessNow’s guidance adjusts to the accessibility needs of the user. It can track curb height, steps in to a space or high thresholds making it invaluable to large swaths of the MS community who might have varying levels of mobility restriction in the day. Ziv, an activist, photographer, and entrepreneur who lives with Muscular Dystrophy, saw an urgent need to easily access this information in her own busy life. But when she started working on the app in 2015, she found that the information barely existed in the first place. “The creativity of crowdsourcing that information and creating that data from scratch started out of necessity,” she says.
By addressing this lack of data, AccessNow not only provides users critical information in a user-friendly, on-the-go interface. It also provides a launching point for advocacy, demanding accountability of businesses and other institutions that should already be thinking about accessibility. Ziv hopes that putting accessibility requirements at the core of the design process becomes the rule of thumb, pointing to the example of a metal grab bar. “It's not necessarily beautiful. It doesn't blend in seamlessly to the rest of the space,” she says. “And that's really not what accessibility and inclusive design is. That's a retrofit.” Quite the opposite of a retrofit, AccessNow works for its users in every way: it’s meant to feel fun and support whatever “lifestyle” means to each individual. And Ziv hopes it pushes for a world in which people living with disabilities aren’t the only ones that consider accessibility, but that it becomes a given in the design process. In the meantime, the AccessNow team is already working on fully rating cities. “We want to get to the place where we've mapped the whole world from the perspective of accessibility first, not as an afterthought,” Ziv says.
David Hojah’s Parrot device takes an equally ambitious approach, combining multiple adaptive technologies into a compact personal assistant that actually looks like its namesake. “I had a parrot in my childhood, parrots are very smart creatures and that's where the name comes from,” Hojah says. “We want the Parrot to be a companion, a friend.” Hojah knew he wanted to create assistive technology, as he knew many loved ones and mentors living with multiple sclerosis and other diseases that often lead to severe physical challenges. He started by working on a camera that would allow a wheelchair user 360 degree views as they navigate. The Parrot now incorporates the 5 C’s, as Hojah puts it: communication assistance, control in the form of safety and navigation features, connectivity with smart home devices, compatibility with an array of switches, and assistance for caregivers.
The Parrot is such a compact solution that it’s hard to believe it fine-tunes multiple technologies to work for those living with all kinds and degrees of physical challenges. “Putting that together in one inclusive framework, at the beginning it was like mission impossible,” Hojah says. “But we tried different things. We have been learning and evolving over time. We want to empower everyone to maximize their independence and freedom.” That level of customization is no small feat: smart home tech, communication devices, and even users’ homes are often not designed with their specific needs in mind. Parrot, on the other hand, is designed around users’ daily lives, and goes a step further to adapt to each individual through learning technology. One particularly meaningful detail serves those who need assistance speaking through a device; unlike most technology that projects a non-customizable computerized voice, Parrot is able to mimic the user’s voice and add tones that convey emotions.
What drew Novartis judges to both Parrot and AccessNow is how deeply they demonstrate an understanding of users’ lived experiences, and continue to incorporate the ideas and feedback of those living with physical challenges at every stage of development. That lends both innovations an impressive level of responsiveness that can even adapt to a changing world. It’s critical when providing lifestyle solutions for those living with diseases like multiple sclerosis; each patient will experience different symptoms, and many people experience changing needs over the course of their life with MS.
“It was exciting to see the creativity and innovation pioneered by AccessNow and Parrot. They are a model of patient-oriented collaborative problem-solving that has great potential to change lives” says Dr. Timothy Coetzee, Chief Science Officer at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and Chair of the judging panel in the competition. “Their fierce commitment to understanding the patient experience, and leveraging that insight to create practical, scalable solutions that address mobility and connection challenges is remarkable and I hope will inspire other innovators.”
Both Ziv and Hojah plan to harness that adaptability as they look to the future. At the onset of Covid-19, Ziv was able to pivot her focus to rating outdoor spaces where users could gather more safely, as well as provide information on the accessibility of stay-at-home services like delivery and web communication. About 80 people are using Parrot devices right now, and Hojah plans to roll out many more. His current focus is offering Parrot devices to those living with severe physical challenges, but as the technology learns through their day-to-day applications, Parrot will also get better at assisting a wider array of people, no matter what their needs. “There is no cure for multiple sclerosis right now, and for many other diseases,” he says. “Technology can be medicine to help them have a great life.”
It’s clear that when accessibility technology is approached intentionally and with plenty of user input, the benefits go way beyond a smart and beautifully designed product. Developing from the outside in gives these ideas an incredible degree of flexibility and make them profoundly important parts of users’ lives. With more companies like Novartis prioritizing innovations like AccessNow and Parrot, accessibility could finally become the norm. “When we do accessibility well, we are including every person,” says Ziv. “Accessibility is in direct strategy to achieve inclusion, and if we do that, we are radically transforming our relationship to each other.”
