A Framework for Product Development in Assistive Technology
Today, we will be discussing three new product examples from the world of assistive technology (a term which includes everything from canes to cochlear implants). Assistive technology poses an economic opportunity for organizations that want to make innovative products. These new product examples suggest a powerful framework for product design, which is matching an exciting new technological innovation to a consumer demographic with both needs and resources, and creating new products to fill in the gaps.
By applying recent advances in artificial intelligence to the challenges posed by hearing loss, vision loss, and urinary tract dysfunction, these products are poised to help their creators both to improve customers’ quality of life and to turn a substantial profit. Aging populations are prime customer segments, as they more commonly suffer from these conditions and control much of the household wealth in some wealthy countries like the United States. We will first describe the new demographic factors that make this opportunity so appealing, and then go into our three new product examples.
Aging Demographics Create New Product Opportunities
We have previously described the financial benefits of embracing accessibility in “Video Game Growth Strategy: Accessibility is the Future”. Assistive technology is similarly economically promising, especially due to demographic factors. According to the WHO, by 2050, more than 3.5 billion people are expected to require assistive technologies. One cause of this increased demand for assistive technology will be an aging population: the same report predicts that the world population of people over 60 will increase to 2.1 billion by the same year.
Furthermore, at least in the United States, this older population controls an increasing percentage of total household wealth. According to the Federal Reserve, while in the year 2000 people over 70 controlled only 20% of the total household wealth, at the end of 2023, people 70+ controlled about 31% of household wealth (and the percentage increased monotonically over that timespan). Wealth is not exactly the same as spending power, but nonetheless these aging populations are a consumer group which cannot be ignored. Accessibility products effectively target this demographic.
New Product Examples in Accessibility:
Orcam Hear Pinpoints Specific Voices
One innovative new product using AI to reach this consumer demographic is the new Orcam Hear. Hearing loss is quite prevalent, affecting 13% of the United States population. Orcam Hear is an in-ear headphone which dampens some sounds and amplifies others. The user can pair the Orcam Hear with their smartphone and then use the Orcam Hear app to train the device to recognize certain voices, by giving it recordings of those voices as training data. Then, Orcam Hear will amplify those voices, while filtering out other sounds. According to PR Newswire:
“The OrCam Hear user can select the members of the conversation by turning each speaker ’on’/’off’ accordingly, with a single tap, enabling effective muting all other voices and ambient noise.”
One practical example of how this might work would be a man with hearing loss going to a noisy restaurant. If he has trained his Orcam Hear to recognize his wife’s voice, then he can better participate in conversation with her despite the noisy environment (or, at the very least, he can ignore her voluntarily). This is, in fact, a good example of a theme we discuss in both the accessible video game article mentioned above as well as my article last year on Loop earplugs: even people with very good hearing can struggle to pick out the voices of their companions in crowded areas, making the consumer base for this AI accessibility product potentially quite broad.
New Product Examples in Accessibility:
MEDiLight Offers Continence Control
Our next new product example is aimed at people with bladder problems. The MEDiLight uses AI to monitor bladder fullness noninvasively. While hearing loss is more common in men, women are more likely to struggle with bladder issues, especially after having children: up to 45% of women report some kind of urinary incontinence. Because this issue is so common, the potential market for products addressing it is quite large. According to the Verge.com, MEDiLight:
“uses near-infrared light to monitor your bladder levels and will alert you when you need to empty the tank.”
The device consists of a patch, stuck on the body in front of the bladder which uses UV light to scan the bladder without penetrating the skin or invading the body at all, and a connected app, which alerts the user when their bladder is full. According to MEDiThings, the:
“A.I. engine is then trained for your specific bladder, providing volume estimations in real-time”
(the interpretation of the data collected by the device is nontrivial, and this is where the AI is used). For people who struggle to anticipate bladder fullness, this can mitigate the effects of urinary tract dysfunction.
New Product Examples in Accessibility:
Lumen Glasses See the World for Visually-Impaired Users
Our final new product example is aimed at the market of visually impaired people. According to Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute,
“Almost 20 million Americans — 8 percent of the U.S. population — have visual impairments. Visual impairments, including blindness, are one of the leading causes of loss of independence among people age 65 and older.”
Guide dogs can help people with visual impairments to live independently, but training guide dogs is a resource-intensive process, which may be why only 2% of blind individuals have guide dogs to help them. This is where the .lumen Glasses come in. According to Medica, in the glasses:
“Cameras record the environment, computer chips calculate the desired path, and the information is passed on to the wearer of the glasses via haptic signals and sounds.”
Medica’s article compares the technology in the glasses to that of a self-driving car. The use of AI is in the calculation of the desired path. The hope is that, unlike guide dogs, which each need to be trained individually, the .lumen Glasses will provide a scalable way to help blind people navigate the environment. The company website even depicts people using the Glasses to help with tasks that a dog could not, such as deciding what to buy at the grocery store. This is quite plausible with recent advances in computer vision, such as the publicly available GPT-4o, which can take in images.
Next Steps for these New Product Examples
With all of these products, we can see a pattern.
- There is a very common problem, affecting a large segment of the population
- The existing solutions are not adequate
- In the wake of recent technological developments, startups have emerged with exciting products that use AI in order to attempt to solve these problems
From a business perspective, these companies are poised to succeed if they can successfully market these new product examples. They have already started off well by identifying viable markets and creating innovative products.
To learn more about the next steps these startups should take, you might want to check out some of our other material. Insight to Action can help you develop a market strategy for any new product. For more new product examples, as well as segments on growth strategy, positioning strategy, customer segmentation, and more, check out our blog. To connect with our team, please visit our website. Finally, to stay up to date with market strategy, consider following our newsletter.
