Prompt system
Prompt-It is a hardware device that turns text from your smart phone into a teleprompter. Could be a lifesaver for people with any type of dexterity or memory difficulties who have to give a presentation in situations where using other types of notes is difficult or undesirable.
Beam me up, Numi
Most of us have wallets or keychains bursting with loyalty and membership cards for various stores, and it doesn’t even take having a disability to experience difficulty finding and retrieving them when needed. Enter the Numi Key, which stores all your card information electronically, then lets you retrieve as needed and wirelessly transmit to a POS device. The display looks pretty legible (can we beg for a voice-output option in a future release?), and the buttons could well be tactilely discernable.
The Gadgeteer: Consolidate your loyalty cards into one device
Buddy system
We’ve written before about automated Twitter messages as a communication strategy, but most examples were either hacks or left little leeway for consciously choosing a desired message. Enter Buddy Radio, a simple device currently being tested with elders by the UK’s National Health Service. Turning the dial sends one of several messages indicating the user’s mood–not clear whether this is preprogrammed or personalizable. Apparently it works not only with Twitter, but also with Facebook, email, and so on. It’s currently being evaluated as a signaling system; off-site family, friends, and other message recipients would presumably be able to interpret when a user needs some type of intervention services. But we have cause to wish it were commercially available now so that people in hospice, recovering from serious injury, etc., would have a nearly effortless way to just provide brief but treasured messages to their circles.
Look, Mazda, no hands
The Swing Pro Solo Auto concept basically does away with the steering wheel. Instead, you make the car turn simply by leaning in the direction you want to go. This has obvious benefits for upper-limb amputees and anyone who has difficulty with grasping or turning a wheel. We can also see elimination of the wheel as improving driving comfort for people who are obese or pregnant. Finally, for people with cognitive conditions such as left/right dyslexia, leaning is probably going to require less effort and allow faster reaction times than steering.
Eye candy
Eyegaze technology has long been a specialized input option for individuals with near-total paralysis, but it’s been expensive, cumbersome, and not always reliable. Now researchers at Dartmouth have come up with a promising mainstream–mainstream!!–eyegaze technology for the Nokia tablet. We’re opticmistic that this can be applied to other devices as well.
GPS crustation
Japanese drivers with left/right dyslexia have a new friend in NaviRobo, a small crab robot that syncs with the Pioneer GPS system and points its claws in the direction you’re supposed to go–a rather elegant non-verbal navigation strategy. The same idea modified into a handheld version could help deaf-blind pedestrians, too.
Gizmodo: GPS crab guides the way with highly accurate claw gestures
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
We were going to just laud the push towards real-time cell phone video as being good for sign language conversing and leave it there. But with the omnipresent development of apps, there is also potential for enhanced augmentative communication–imagine, for example, that someone who feels most comfortable communicating via pictograms could actually send and receive graphics via video rather than relying on translation into an audio format.