Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Employment of Persons with Disabilities through Inclusion Engineering (EDIE)

Adults with neurodevelopmental disabilities (e.g., autism spectrum disorder; ASD) and/or motor impairments (e.g., multiple sclerosis; MS) have the lowest rates of any type of employment in the US (unemployment rate of 63-68%). The potential economic benefits of improving employment outcomes for these individuals are enormous. For example, the current economic opportunity cost to the US economy of unemployed individuals with ASD is estimated at $90 billion per year, to say nothing of the immeasurable human costs; for individuals with MS, the estimated loss to the economy is approximately $25 billion per year.

This National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) Planning Grant award to Vanderbilt University will address this potential by creating the capacity for a future NSF ERC for the Employment of Persons with Disabilities through Inclusion Engineering (EDIE). EDIE would seek to create engineered systems to lower barriers to employment for neurodiverse and motor-impaired individuals, such that they can more readily maintain or pursue meaningful employment.

To be fully ready for ERC scale, we need to more fully develop a number of critical elements through this planning grant, specifically: (1) An ERC work plan guided by a 5-year timeline for deliverables that emphasizes (a) stakeholder engagement and assessment of user needs, (b) pilot testing of technologies with and through partner organizations, (c) development of technologies to minimum viable product (MVP) stage, (d) testing through large-scale deployment, and (e) sustainability through commercialization of the technologies. (2) Commercialization strategies (e.g., start-ups and licensing agreements) that would create a self-sustained innovation ecosystem. (3) A plan to gradually expand the Center’s scope to include a wider range of both technologies and disabilities, consistent with the mission of creating a more inclusive workforce.

The proposed vision of the planned EDIE ERC is to create intelligent, adaptive technologies that enable employment and workplace success for individuals with neurodevelopmental and/or motor disabilities, increasing human productivity and economic impact, and leading to a more fully inclusive workforce and society. Guiding these Engineered Systems would be the enabling idea of Inclusion Engineering, an emerging research paradigm representing the convergence of engineering with implementation science, labor and economic policy, and commercial innovation, toward enabling full societal inclusion of all individuals.

Multiple technological innovations will need to be pursued in concert toward a truly systems-level solution for full inclusion of motor-impaired and neurodiverse individuals for the future of work. Thus, we envision that surrounding and supporting EDIE’s core research thrusts will be an innovation ecosystem that includes commercialization efforts coupled to key stakeholder needs and feedback, a culture of diversity and inclusion with regards both to Center personnel and end-users, and a multi-pronged effort toward developing a future engineering workforce that is trained, equipped, and inspired to advance the future of Inclusion Engineering.

The preliminary convergent research thrusts that we have identified are: (1) Workplace disability inclusion and employment nondiscrimination policy to ensure these individual technologies and the resulting engineering systems are based on Participatory Action Research (PAR) to have real-world uptake and societal impact; (2) Social Human-Machine Interaction (sHMI) to support neurodiverse individuals; and (3) Physical Human-Machine Interaction (pHMI) to support motor-impaired individuals. The second and third thrusts map directly into engineered systems, while the first guides them and also addresses issues that are not directly addressable via technological solutions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.