Assistive technology is a niche market, which often makes it difficult to find sufficient funding and resources for it. How can we increase awareness and interest in addressing this important challenge? The rise of hackathons seems to be a promising step for promoting the development of assistive technologies and increasing awareness about the challenges facing people with disabilities. While the hackathon model seems promising, its method of implementation has a large impact on its success in advancing assistive technology.
For example, I am an organizer of HackMIT, a 1000-person hackathon for undergraduate students from around the world. The structure of HackMIT and availability of sponsor prizes incentivizes students to vie for flashy, impressive hacks that are fully functional by the end of a weekend. There is a larger push for developing a high-fidelity product in a short period of time, which differs vastly from the iterative product design process that assistive technology production requires. ASLTegra, a sign language interpreter app, is an example of an assistive technology that was born from HackPrinceton, but in general it is rare to find hacks that address a disability.
ASLTegra, a sign language interpreting app developed at HackPrinceton (Source: http://devpost.com/software/asltegra-the-eye-of-the-tegra)
ATHack, meanwhile, is a more successful model of a hackathon that results in tangible assistive technologies being developed. Unlike HackMIT, ATHack pairs students with clients, enabling them to focus on a specific problem. This is critical for assistive technologies in particular, which are difficult to generalize to an entire population and often need to be customized to the user. Moreover, the hackathon places less stress on creating a finished product, instead focusing on prototypes, which is much closer to the product design process. Puffin, a mouth-enabled smartphone joystick, is an example of an assistive technology that was born out of ATHack as a prototype, and was later developed into a fully-fledged product.
Puffin, a sip-puff joystick developed at the ATHack hackathon (Source: http://news.mit.edu/2015/perspective-athack-assistive-technologies-hackathon-0601)
On a general level, hackathons are an excellent opportunity to rapidly generate and test ideas. But in order to promote developing assistive technology, it is critical to have a specific focus for the hackathon, engage with clients who are the target audience, and structure the process around iterative design. Without these characteristics, participants are less likely to find motivation to work on assistive technologies.
I think there are some really good aspects to Hackathons, but one aspect that is especially difficult for the AT community is what happens after the weekend. With AT devices there is a strong need for continued product support, because oftentimes the user is not physically able to repair a broken device. My worry with the hacking approach (and to some degree PPAT), is that a really useful product gets developed, a user grows to rely on the product, but the team then disappears and support is not available. Thoughts?