Developing Tools and Techniques to Enhance Low-Volume Assistive Technology Design

Assistive technology (AT) encompasses a broad range of products that help individuals with disabilities sustain or enhance their functional capabilities. While these products improve the quality of life for many people, they face high abandonment rates and limited commercial viability, largely due to the unique challenges of their design and development. Some of these challenges include market uncertainty, insufficient stakeholder engagement, reliance on tacit knowledge and the complexities of designing for low-volume production. The objective of this project is to provide low-volume AT developers with pragmatic tools and techniques to address these challenges and inform design decisions during product development. These advancements have the potential to improve the design process and enhance the impact of low-volume AT, ensuring they are both market-ready and user-accepted.

The proposed objective will be achieved through three specific aims. The first aim seeks to engage low-volume AT developers in order to document their product development methods and identify key factors influencing their design decisions. The second aim is to evaluate whether crowdsourcing platforms offer a cost-effective approach to improve market assessment and stakeholder engagement compared to traditional methods. The final aim focuses on constructing and validating a data-driven design tool that informs decision-making during low-volume AT development. This research will contribute to the state of knowledge by developing cost-efficient and practical product development methods aimed at reducing the burden on AT developers, improving product-market fit, and increasing the likelihood of commercial success for low-volume AT devices.