Skip to main content

Adaptive technologies designed by and for people with disabilities


March 03, 2015

The best adaptive technologies are designed by, not for, people with disabilities, says Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan, senior vice president for knowledge enterprise development at ASU, in a Future Tense article for Slate magazine.

Truly effective technologies require collaboration between the creator and the user, Panch argued. This is especially true when the user has a specific disability and the technology being created aims to lesson the burden of that disability.

Panch describes his firsthand experience in working with a visually-impaired student to develop a new technology that would help alleviate the stress of the student's disability. The result was Note-Taker, a device developed by ASU student David Hayden at the CUbiC lab.

Note-Taker ultimately won the national and world competitions in the “touch and tablet” category at the worldwide Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. The invention was so effective that it became popular among all students that got the chance to use it.

"Once visually impaired students started using Note-Taker in classrooms, something truly remarkable happened. Sighted students began asking for the technology for their own use. This is not actually uncommon among well-designed assistive devices," Panch writes.

To learn more about effective design of adaptive technologies, read the full article at Future Tense.

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society.

Article source: Slate

More ASU in the news

 

Arizona State University helping prepare people for careers in growing semiconductor industry

Matthew McConaughey and ASU are helping an Arizona school district. Here's how

We need to address the generative AI literacy gap in higher education