One day, Karri Haen Whitmer took her son Ethan, who has autism, to school in Ames. He was crying. He didn’t want to go. And then she saw something that turned into a “lightbulb moment.”
“There was a parent taking a wheelchair out of a car for their child,” Haen Whitmer said. “I was like, ‘Wait a second, they’re sending a technology for their child. Why can’t I?’”
She quickly learned the technology she had in mind didn’t exist, but it wasn’t long before the components were there.
“What we see now is that with large language models, the AI that we have today, that suddenly things that were science fiction a few years ago are happening,” said Haen Whitmer, whose son is 10.
Haen Whitmer is CEO and co-founder of Ama AI, an online disability accessibility platform. The minimum viable product was available a year ago, she said. The idea for the platform is to take information from therapy sessions with a person with autism and put it into the system so it can apply therapy skills to school and home, where users need those skills.
“We train an AI agent with data from the child,” she said.
Among its uses – it deploys chatbot technology to talk to users either verbally or using the keypad and is equipped with knowledge of their challenges and strategies used in therapy, she said.
“It would be essentially like I’m taking my therapist with me,” she said. “The system can … automatically apply accommodations for school work, but it’s also going to be able to help mitigate behavioral issues, things that are particularly common for autistic children.”
The child’s entire care team can access the platform and input and extract data from it, Haen Whitmer said.
“One of the issues for parents like myself with a child with a disability or cognitive disability is we really just want our kids to be independent someday,” she said. “That’s the worst thought is that something could happen to you, and your child wouldn’t be independent, and where [would] they go and what happens to them? So I started working on how, with this assistive technology … a child could start to gain independence.”
Haen Whitmer said Ethan’s school has been “really amazing,” and everyone has been invested in making the environment inclusive for him.
“Unfortunately, teachers are just so overburdened, and when there are multiple kids with cognitive differences in a classroom, that can be really difficult to manage,” she said. “He was starting to have a lot of those negative experiences, despite adults being really invested and trying to make things right, and I recognized that the issue was that there just is a deficit of assistive technology for children with cognitive disabilities.”
Haen Whitmer is the associate chair of genetics development and cell biology at Iowa State University. Her co-founders are her husband, Chris Whitmer, a mechanical engineer who has another company focused on engineering software for education, and Vikas Jyoty, a software engineer.
Among Haen Whitmer’s funders are NMotion, a Nebraska-based accelerator program operated by gener8tor, which she was in last spring and came away with a $100,000 investment in the startup and7.5% equity.
She has also received $150,000 in grant funding from the NewSchools Venture Fund based in Oakland, Calif., to work on the prototype for Ama AI, $125,000 in USDA Small Business Innovation Research funding with a $75,000 state match, and a $50,000 Iowa Economic Development Authority proof of commercial relevance loan.
Ama AI also recently partnered with MAC Midwest, a nonprofit autism services provider with locations across Minnesota, to undertake a pilot project.
The initial pilot will be with five or six people and the device will be used to reinforce the skills behavioral therapists are teaching, said Christine Bent, CEO of MAC Midwest.
“What the individual learners learn with us, we want to make sure that they continue those skills when they’re outside of our setting,” Bent said. “This device would travel with them, with the learner, home with their families or into their schools. That’ll have the ability to reinforce what they’ve learned and have more continuity of care.”
She’s looking forward to learning from the pilot whether the technology is supportive of the work behavioral therapists do, she said.
“A behavioral therapist — that’s a high turnover role for us,” she said. “If there are elements of this that make their role easier, I think that would be fantastic.”
Haen Whitmer also piloted her technology this summer with All Aboard for Kids, a nonprofit summer camp for kids with autism, said Lisa McCarty, president and co-founder of All Aboard for Kids.
McCarty, who has three children with autism, said her son Gabe, 19, talked to Ama AI about different vacation spots.
“Their back-and-forth covered things like travel distance, transportation options and which places might be closer, more affordable, or more fun based on his interests,” McCarty wrote in an email. “It was really fun to watch him engage and see/hear the conversation unfold — and it got him very excited about the idea of taking a trip.”
Scott Henderson, managing principal of NMotion, with offices in Lincoln, Neb., and Omaha, said he sees applications for this technology that go beyond the neurodiverse population.
“Lifelong learning companions will be something that we all, going forward, will have access to,” he said. “We’re all wired differently. … And so we all learn differently. We all process information differently. We all have different areas of interest and different mental loops that we go through.”
The future of the Ama AI technology goes beyond learning and ventures into safety as well, Haen Whitmer said.
“We’re just trying to pull this AI off the screen and get it out into the world where it can actually help kids [who] are autistic or have other cognitive disabilities be able to manage the world a little bit more independently,” she said.
She said the technology could help with executive function issues, which are common among autistic children.
“[It] means … before you want to do something, in your mind, you have a checklist of things, should I or shouldn’t I do that? And autistic children often just bypass that checklist and are like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go do that.’”
She said her goal is to have the technology play a role in preventing safety concerns.
“The ideal would be, if your child is wearing a device that could alert you that this is happening, that would be life saving,” she said.