Transit App Earns Small Business Innovation Research Grant
News
A team of Carnegie Mellon researchers that includes HCII Associate Professor John Zimmerman has earned a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) for their mobile app and spinout company, Tiramisu. Other primary investigators on the grant include School of Computer Science faculty members Anthony Tomasic from the Language Technologies Institute and Aaron Steinfeld of the Robotics Institute.
From the Italian for "pick me up," Tiramisu is a mobile social computing app that connects riders and transit providers. The app accesses and shares data that the bus’s onboard modems transmit via GPS to a real-time server, and also allows users to generate their own real-time arrival information by sharing location traces as they ride buses and trains.
The grant is part of the NIDILRR's Small Business Innovation Research Program, which funds research and development projects that stimulate technological innovation, increase small business participation in federal research and development, foster and encourage participation by minority and disadvantaged persons in technological innovation, and increase private sector commercialization of technology derived from federal research and development.
The Tiramisu team will achieve these goals by extending the app to empower individuals with disabilities, who face more obstacles concerning public transportation than people without disabilities. The $75,000 grant will allow the team to develop a stronger social network that allows riders to boost their communication with each other and with transit agencies. The team hopes that such increased communication will improve the quality of the transit service and create a more accessible environment for people with disabilities. Better access to transportation also means easier access to healthcare facilities and a stronger sense of community.
"We envision a world where individuals with disabilities are empowered to form a community voice that will impact transit agencies and the transportation service provided and serve as a model to impact other public services and society as a whole," the team wrote in their proposal.
The Tiramisu system supports the research team at the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Accessible Public Transportation. In addition to PIs Zimmerman, Tomasic and Steinfeld, the team also includes Charlie Garrod from CMU's Institute for Software Research.
Read more about the app on the Tiramisu site.