Mobile phones have transformed the way we communicate with friends and family, coordinate our daily activities, and organize our lives. For families with children with cognitive disabilities there is widespread hope, though not always fulfilled, that personal technologies - particularly mobile phones - can bring a dramatic increase in their children's level of safety, independence, and social connectedness. In this research, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five families to understand the current patterns of remote communication among young adults with cognitive disabilities and their parental caregivers, and the role that remote communication played in increasing independence and safety. While some of the young adults used mobile phones and some did not, we identified common themes in requirements, patterns of use, and desires for an accessible mobile-phone based remote communication system. Requirements include the need for a simplified navigation menu with fewer options and a rugged handset and charger input. Families used mobile phones for safety check-ins and help getting un-stuck. While parents desired increased social involvement for their children, they observed that their children did not often chat with friends on the phone.

A surprisingly high percentage of assistive technology devices (35% or more) are purchased, but not successfully adopted. Through semi-structured interviews with a dozen families, we have come to understand the role technology plays in the lives of families who have a young adult with cognitive disabilities, and how families find, acquire, and use these technologies. This study addresses gaps in existing research and informs future efforts in assistive technology design. Design implications include the importance of simplicity not only in technology function but in configuration, documentation, maintenance, and upgrade or replacement; as well as the need for designers to use methods that consider the multiple individuals and stages involved in the technology adoption process.

Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities.An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing “how things are” for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project.This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an “in-the-world” research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling techniques; and the design of universally accessible interfaces for complex systems through participatory design processes.This article provides both a near-term vision and an architecture for transportation systems that are socially inclusive, technologically appealing, and easier for everyone to use.