Problem: Wearable devices are seen as “add-ons” today (i.e. adding smart glasses to your wardrobe or adding smart watches to your wardrobe). This is not super useful for people with disabilities who don’t want to augment or add-on to their abilities, but simply want to augment their abilities to match those of able-bodied individuals.
Solution: This business would focus on creating wearable technology, clothing, and more that can be used to assist people with disabilities. Of course, if a technology is able to help someone with a disability then it can also be marketed to the general public for entirely new use-cases. Kat Holmes is a key leader in the field of inclusive design and has argued that:
One of the greatest shortcomings of human-centered design is its lack of guidance on how to include diversity as part of the design process. Which human, exactly, belongs in the center? Most designers end up using their own abilities and experience as a baseline for their designs. This problem is even more pronounced for the predominantly young and able-bodied designers that work in technology. The result is products that work well for people with similar abilities and resources, but end up largely excluding everyone else. This is especially true for roughly 1 billion people on the planet with disabilities.
Inclusion, I believe, will help to reach “the next billion users” and will also create entirely new billion-dollar businesses in entirely new contexts.
Some of the technologies that this company would focus on creating include earbuds that are linked to clothing to provide a form of "Human Echolocation” to help those who are hard-of-hearing, shoes that have cameras on them that vibrate if a user is about to collide with an object to help those with visual disabilities, and more. Assistive clothing would design embedded clothing to provide information about for those with disabilities.
One of the limiting factors of mass adoption of wearable computing devices is the social stigma associated with them. In a 2016 paper published by Halley Profita and her research team, they “surveyed 1,200 individuals about the use of a head-mounted display in a public setting… Our findings reveal that observers considered head-mounted display use more socially acceptable if the device was being used to support a person with a disability.” In short, this business would also tap into (and benefit from) the implicit social-biases that people have about seeing people who wear and use assistive devices. For more, see minute 19 of this video (also embedded on our website).
Leah Findlater, Assistant Professor at UW Human Centered Design and Engineering discusses how augmented reality can address real world accessibility problems.
Monetization: Selling these assistive technologies. Perhaps the company would adapt a “buy-one-give-one” model to provide free assistive technologies to the disabled depending on sales.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)