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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Brian Mullen, PhD
http://www.therapeuticsystems.com/ | bayuvest.com | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Zrc2Wny-Y
Free Webinar: “Getting the Right Mobility Equipment and Services” http://bit.ly/1oubC9H
This phone lets you send smells along with your texts http://cnn.it/1ouaov2
Samsung has assistive tech trio for Galaxy Core Advance http://bit.ly/1ou80o5
App: Language TherAppy www.BridgingApps.org
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—–transcript follows —–
BRIAN MULLEN: Hi, this is Brian Mullen, and I’m the CEO of Therapeutic Systems, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 147 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on March 21, 2014. Today I talk with Brian Mullen about some interesting technology for individuals who have mental illness and autism. I have some interesting information about some stuff from Samsung and some of their smartphones, and an app called Language TherAppy. We hope you’ll give us a call on our listener line 317-721-7124.
I spend a lot of time on the show talking about iPads, iPhones, Apple products and those kind of things, but from our friends over at Top Tech Tidbits at Flying Blind, there’s an article here that came out couple weeks ago that I find interesting. It originally comes from How to Geek, it talks about whether or not PCs are dying. This article is actually quite long and gives a lot of interesting information, but basically says that in the fourth quarter of 2013, 82.6 million computers were shipped, and although that’s a seven percent drop from the previous year, that decline has been slowing. They show some statistics that talk about how desktop browsers to account for the preponderance of website visits and that even though the decline of PCs is happening, more computers were shipped there tablets in the fourth quarter of 2013. They go on to talk about some of the reasons why we’re seeing these changes and why we’re not seeing PCs go away as soon as folks might have thought. Interesting dialogue here about the PC and the tablet and I think a pretty honest look at what’s happening in the industry. I’m going to encourage you to check out our show notes. I’ll have a link over to that How to Geek article and you can decide for yourself. Are PCs dying or not?
The folks over at the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, the NCSIA, is hosting a free webinar series. The next one is going to be on Thursday, March 27, so not too long after the release of this podcast, 2 o’clock Eastern Time. The webinar is kind of legislative in nature. They’re going to talk about what rules under Medicare may prevent you from getting power wheelchairs, prescription drugs, or other medical supplies. You’ll also learn about legislation to improve access to customize wheelchairs and other medical equipment. The speaker for the day is Alexandra Benwith who is the vice president of government relations, and I’ll pop a link in the show notes where you can register for this free webinar that’s happening on March 27.
From our friends over at RESNA, we learn about an article that appeared in CNN about the O-Phone. The O-Phone is an odor phone. There’s a group in Paris who have created a device that will allow users to combine aromas and then send that smell to somebody else over the Internet, and they have a device that will re-create that voter for the recipient to smell on their end. When I was a kid, we used to joke about the smell-o-vision and smell-o-phone, but it sounds like it’s actually happening here. There are also a couple of other research projects that are talked about here in this article that have to do with simulating smell and taste for somebody who would be able to put a device on their tongue and have their brain perceive that they are testing or smelling certain things. What does this have to do with assistive technology? Well later in the article, it talks about possible implications for folks who are blind or visually impaired who could use that olfactory information to learn more about their environment. They also talk about using it to train emergency workers how to recognize the smell of noxious fumes or poisonous gases or other things. It’s one of the five senses, and smell is something that seems to be on the Internet now, so I’ll pop you think in the show notes over to the CNN article and you can read more about the O-Phone and what’s happening with this Internet-based smell phone.
According to Phys.org, Samsung has a new group of accessories that do assistive functions for their Galaxy Core Advance smartphones. They recently announced three different things. One is called Ultrasonic Cover, the next is Optical Scan stand, and the final is called Voice Label. Ultrasonic Cover detects obstacles for folks who are blind or visually impaired and gives them some alerts through vibration or text-to-speech feedback. The Optical Scan is a stand that will hold the smartphone in the right position so that it can scan printed material and do OCR on them. The last is a near field communication technology called Voice Label. Based on the article that I’m reading, it looks like you put a tag on an item that you want to have labeled and the smartphone is smart enough to read whatever information you associate with that label. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes so that you can read more about what’s happening with Samsung and these cool new things for the Galaxy Core Advance smartphones.
Each week, one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps. Here’s an app worth mentioning.
BRIDGING APPS: Today I’m going to talk about language TherAppy by Tactus Therapy Solutions. This is a collection of apps which are also sold individually that target the four main areas of language: comprehension, naming, reading, and writing. It was designed for clients with aphasia or other adult language impairments, but we’ve used it with teens with expressive and receptive deficits, and you could use it with younger users. You just have to adjust some of the prompts that are built in and change – there’s a setting that says I’m using this with kids or I’m using this with teens or adults. So you can select that. You just have to do a little bit more work on your end.
This app is great because it uses the same set of vocabulary to target all four areas, so you don’t have to come up with a whole bunch of new words. It’s a very extensive list of vocabulary. You can add to it which is a great feature. When you open the app, you see four different sections. The first section I’m going to talk about is the comprehension. That targets understanding. By having the user listen or read a prompt on a screen, and then they just select the correct images. It would say, show me the airplane, and there’s an airplane and a bus and a boy walking. They have to pick the right image. The naming section is the next one, and this one is the one that I use the most. You can create a test for the user, you can practice naming, you just see an image and you say what is this? There are a whole host of prompts that are built in. What letters does it start with? Where would you find it? What does it look like? What does it smell like? All these different sensory ways that users can find that name and work that they’re trying to find. You can also practice describing images. The next section is reading. That allows the user to match or complete phrases or sentences depending on their reading level. The last section is the writing section which allows the client to drag letters on the screen to either fill in the blank, copy the blank that they see, or spell out what they see or hear.
This is great for a speech therapist or if your speech therapist tells you that you need to work on something at home, you can get this app. It’s phenomenal. It’s very well designed. Another great feature about this app is that it allows you to track the data and record it so when you try to exit out of the app, it tells you do want to email it to yourself, do you want to printed out, so it allows you to track progress very easily. You can find this app on the iTunes Store for $60 or you can buy individual sections which range from $15-$25 each, depending on the one that you’re looking to get. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
WADE WINGLER: In my spare time, I really enjoy watching TED talks. I haven have the TED talks app on my cell phone. Whenever I have 10 or 20 minutes to listen to some smart people talk about some interesting things, I find myself doing that. Just within the last few days, I saw a TED by Doctor Brian Mullen who is very interested in assistive technology and how it impacts people with autism and mental illness. It turns out that he and I have a colleague in common who was able to connect us and I have him on Skype today. Doctor Mullen, are you there?
BRIAN MULLEN: I am; thank you for having me.
WADE WINGLER: Good, Brian, thank you so much for being on our show. You and I have a friend in common, Doctor Patricia Wright, who has recently talked about autism on the show. She was good enough to put us in contact with one another. I’m really glad that she was able to do that. I’m fascinated about your work and what’s going on there. Before I jump into the conversation here a little more deeply, I’ll remind folks that I’m still getting over a cold, so if people are hearing my voice and thinking are you okay, yes I feel much better than I sound. I had to throw that quick disclaimer in there.
Brian, a lot of folks don’t know that I actually started my career in disability services and mental health. I worked in a state operated until healthcare facility, and was very hands-on with folks in that environment. I have to say that assistive technology with not one of the first things that was either used or thought of in the context of that mental health work. I understand that you’re an engineer who is focusing on assistive technology for folks with autism or mental illness. I need to know a little bit about how you got into space, how you got here. You have a personal connection or a family member with autism question mark how did this happen?
BRIAN MULLEN: So it’s a very interesting story or different story because I went to grad school as a 22-year-old trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted to be the assistive technology. I actually wanted to initially try to help make technologies for veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and this was in 2004. It was right in the heart of the different wars. I had friends who were in the military that got called up from the reserves. I thought that what I wanted to do as a career, I could go to grad school and design AT for vets.
Long story about my grad school, picking a grad school and everything else, when I got to University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I did my undergrad, I was looking for a project to work on in AT. An occupational therapist from a local hospital who was in OT and mental health and their acute mental health care unit, approached my advisor because he had done work with autism and assistive technology before around a technology to help with intervention called deep pressure which we can get into more detail later.
She was telling me the story about how with the experiences, when someone goes into an acute mental health care facility and how that they use restraints, seclusion. So for your audience, if they don’t understand, I was shocked when I learned about this was restraint and seclusion still today is used when nothing else works. Someone either gets sedated and knocked out with chemicals, physically restrained to a bed with restraints, or locked in a room by themselves. The reason why this is used a lot or is used at all is to make sure that person doesn’t hurt themselves or others until they can come down for lack of a better terminology. I was get worried about using the terminology, because I’m not a mental healthcare professional so I know there’s some differences in how to phrase things. I found out about that and was shocked kind of appalled that that was the state of our minds in treating our mental health. Especially compared to our physical health. I was naïve as a 22-year-old that I thought they would be on the same kind of page.
I think it was in my TED talk, I said that I took a risk and said I’m either going to graduate with an advanced degree in engineering where I’d be okay and be able to find a job, or I would be one of the few engineers working in the field of mental health care and designing technology for people with different brain disorders. Because I realized no engineers were in that space or very few were. It Was a different path to go down and I could take that risk as a grad student.
WADE WINGLER: I think that you probably are one of the only if not the only engineer that I’ve ever met who was interested in that space. I also think it’s fascinating that when I was working in the field of mental health, it’s been over 20 years ago, that that was a state-of-the-art then and it seems to continue to be the state-of-the-art these days. I was on what they call a takedown team at that point, where we actually had to physically restrain folks. I’m glad that there’s work being done in this area and think there’s a need for it. You mentioned kind of in passing that deep pressure is one of the techniques that kind of emerging in that area. Talk to me little bit about that for folks who might not be familiar with it.
BRIAN MULLEN: So the occupational therapist I worked with was taking – she had heard about interventions being used with kids with autism. Most of your audience has heard of someone called Temple Grandin, who was a very famous person with autism. Her story about how, using this firm pressure, firm squeezing of the body helped to regulate her feelings, her stress and her anxiety. She built herself a squeezing machine, a big box that she would go in and inflate and give her that pressure. There’s a great story on her life and HBO special on it. I recommend the audio so go watch that video.
This occupational therapist was looking at that and started to integrate – and she’s one of the leaders in the field, Tina Champagne. She is based in Massachusetts. She was looking at bringing those interventions into an acute mental health care setting with the goal of reducing the need for restraints and seclusion. So helping someone regulate better before they get to a point where they escalated up to a point where they need restraints or seclusion. Things that fall under that category, pressure, weighted blankets or vests, these other squeeze technologies, but it’s also aromatherapy beneath that, sound therapy. Just having quiet rooms in different sensory environments that someone isn’t and how to use that different stimuli to calm and regulate or get someone in the right emotional state that they need.
I phrase it now with my company, one of the goals is to provide technology that gives the person the right sensory input at the right time and the right amount for the given environment and the given task so that you can perform your best. I know that’s kind of a muffle. To relate to your audience, and this is how I related to it and why I bought into this because it sounds a little different. I wrote my dissertation and my research and everything else in a coffee shop, and I still do it now for hours. I needed that background noise that kind of commotion, that lighting and setting. I got into that mental zone where you could sit down and work for a good period of time and be focused. Others of my friends couldn’t do that. They have to go to a library where it was nice and quiet. They could sit and not be distracted.
One of the things I like to say on specifically with autism and people with mental illnesses around the sensory stuff is that for you or I, we can go to a coffee shop and still work even though that wasn’t our preferred setting or library and work and just not be as productive, but you could still function and perform and produce. But if you have a sensory issue where the sensory stimuli really affect how you feel and think and act and perform, which is very common in people with autism, and one of the reasons why I focused so much on autism these past few years, it becomes very difficult. So any variation, things that you and I would find common could actually be painful or a major distraction and really trigger some flight or fight response. That’s kind of a general 10,000 foot overview of sensory issues and what we look at the past few years.
WADE WINGLER: I think that’s very helpful, and anecdotally, I’m the “hang out at Starbucks and write the proposal” kind of guy. I need my earbuds in that environment. I cannot get that perspective. You have started a company called Therapeutic Systems, based on your research, and you’re the founder and CEO of that. I would like to know a little bit about what it’s like to start that kind of company and what the state of the company is. What are you guys working on these days?
BRIAN MULLEN: I think I mentioned this is in the TED talk too, but I referred to start this company and my whole journey as being Alice going down the rabbit hole, not knowing what I was getting myself into and going down is very different adventure of a world that I didn’t know existed and learning a lot about it along the way.
I started the company actually because we got some press about the research I was doing as a grad student about a pressure vest that we were created that would inflate that someone could get the right amount of pressure at the right time for the given task, discreetly and in a wearable way that could allow them to do more and go further in whatever they wanted to do and not be constrained by their sensory processing issues. With that, we got a bunch of feedback. One parent in particular was telling me her story with tears in her eyes about wanting me to make her one. This is a duct taped together super glued prototype that we got some press around, and I was like, I can’t do that. So that week I wrote our first executive summary which is the first step of starting a business that everyone told you to write. I entered a business competition at University Massachusetts. We didn’t win that year, but I learned a lot about starting a company. I got a lot of support. Then the next year we won and it was kind of off to the races.
The goal of that company though was to make sure that we produced and evidence-based insurance reimbursed medical device. I felt the people, and still do passionately, that people with mental illness and brain disorders deserve the same standard and quality of care as you would have if you had a physical condition. Starting the company, this is a really new and novel thing, if you think about it. There’s a ton of medical devices for physical disabilities or ailments, I don’t know if anyone can really name any medical devices for mental illness or brain disorders. They are very few and far between. It makes it a very difficult pathway to start a company and raise the funding to do that because most people don’t, when I tell them I have a medical device for mental illness or medical device for people to autism, they look at me like, what question mark there’s medical devices for mental illness? First they say what’s really mental illness? Then they ask there’s a medical device that can help with our brains? So there’s a lot of education that goes along with that, which is a struggle.
There’s also struggle about getting funding to do research, because as many of you must know if you’re in the mental health care field, we don’t really know how to measure if something works with brain disorders. Specifically around autism, there’s a lot of debate on who goes into the study and how you measure benefits. There’s a ton of improvement in the field for the last 10 years I’ve been working on this, but is still a long way to go. It’s still a very early field of research and development. A lot of great trends around more funding for mental illness, more funding for autism. Hopefully we can keep being involved in that and get us over the obstacles in front of us.
WADE WINGLER: And I think it’s important work to be done. I agree there’s certainly a lot to be done in that area. Brian, we’ve got a couple of minutes left. I’d like to hear a little bit about what you see as the practicality of the products that you guys are creating or looking to create and maybe tell me a quick story about somebody whose life has been impacted by your work.
BRIAN MULLEN: So we have a few stories and it’s what keeps me motivated about everything from parents talking about their kids being more regulated and doing more, or the kids being able to focus more when they do their homework and maybe not getting that second dose of medicine. I think one of the key ones that I think really stands out is a woman who has Asperger’s and PTSD who would be carrying around weighted vest and weighted blankets that she would put on all day to help keep her regulated. A weighted blanket is like 30 to 40 pounds, and she would be carrying it around with her to the grocery store. But the more important thing is she would say it really helped her better with her relationship with her daughter and that having a tool to help regulate and do more and look for participate in life more fully.
That’s the whole goal. That leads into the design of the product. The major issue is how do you design products and technologies that go into the community to allow you to participate in life more fully and really thinking about that experience, not just the acute mental health care facility or whatever else. It’s really about giving somebody the ability to have control over their own care and to translate that care into the real world setting.
Our design really looked at a few different things. One, we wanted to make it safe and not be able to be something that’s using the constraint. So a very simple thing is we put Velcro on everything because it’s something that even if you have poor motor control skills, most people can get out of Velcro. That means that this can’t be used as a restraint. Something someone can choose to take on and off. We really looked at other things like trying to make it very wearable and very light. Something that can go underneath clothing or be as discreet as possible so that someone can go out into the real world and uses in a real-world setting. Again, have that pressure whenever they want, wherever they want, however they want.
But we also took into account the caregiver side of things where that sensitive control of allowing that person, if they are cognitively able to, self-control and give that control to that person to participate in their care. But at the same time have the ability as a care provider to quickly and easily take that control away if it wouldn’t be safe for the person to do it. It’s really a partnership in designing for both the care provider as well as the individual using the technology to get the right mix very easily without a lot of changing settings and whatever else. Actually a push of a button and you’re tailoring that for that person and environment in that task.
WADE WINGLER: I think that philosophy is important. We spent a lot of time talking on the show about assistive technology and having the right technology for the right individual. I feel like you and I could talk for hours about that, but unfortunately we’re out of time for now. Before we go, can you give folks some contact information so that if they want to reach out to you then they can do that?
BRIAN MULLEN: Sure, you can find more information about the product itself at www.bayuvest.com. The name of the product is Bayu. It’s named after the Hindi God of wind and air. You can reach out to me directly. My email address is brian@therapeuticsystems.com. Also feel free to find me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com/brianmullen.
WADE WINGLER: I’ll also pop a link to those websites in the show notes and also to your TED Talk. I would really encourage folks to check that out. Brian Mullen is the founder and CEO of therapeutic systems, somebody very interested in assistive technology for folks with autism and mental illness. Doctor Mullen, thanks for being our show today.
BRIAN MULLEN: Great, thank you very much.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.
