Innovating for Inclusivity

In 2001, Sunish Gupta, SDM ’12, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa—a degenerative eye disease that causes progressive vision loss. As a process engineer, Gupta’s work was highly visual, so his work—along with his lifestyle—had to change.

It was a difficult prognosis, but Gupta was determined to learn and innovate through it. He started volunteering with the National Federation of the Blind to develop assistive technologies for people with disabilities. Alongside legendary MIT inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, SB ’70, Gupta went on to commercialize the first portable reader for those with vision impairments. “You might be surprised how many technologies first appeared in the disability world, then became popular in the mainstream world,” explains Gupta, who provided predictive-texting technology as such an example.

As a participant in the MIT Media Lab’s Reality Virtually Hackathon, Gupta led a team through the design and construction of an augmented reality app that assists the visually impaired with spatial direction and navigation. The ARound app combines sound, camera, and geolocation data to construct an augmented auditory reality. It functions like a personal pedestrian signal but with wider applicability, alerting the user to the location of places and objects such as post offices and doors. The functionality of ARound expands beyond real-time updates—it also records and tags locations with sounds, which enables the user to retrace their path. The sound tags can be added to a shared library, similar to the way photos can be pinned to a location on Google Maps. At the 2017 Hackathon, ARound earned the contest’s top honor.

Gupta enrolled in MIT’s System Design and Management (SDM) master’s program almost a decade after his retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis. Having ample experience on the design side, he was motivated to address the gap in technological capacity and a designer’s accessibility concerns. “The program provided me with systems design thinking skills. You have to consider the organizational and human aspects of your solution, beyond the technologies involved.”

Gupta is recognized as an accessibility expert and has since championed the development and integration of assistive technologies through a variety of roles, including as an advisor to Amazon and IBM. “The mindset is changing,” he says. “Companies and organizations are taking a more proactive approach. They think, how can we take this design thinking and make sure we are building into the product as opposed to finding out once it’s already built? Accessibility has now become competitive; it’s not just a compliance or diversity and inclusion initiative.”

So what’s next? Gupta is busy expanding the reach of Easy Alliance, an organization he founded that aims to address the long-term challenges of inclusive technology design. “I want to make sure that small and medium businesses can sustain and continue to innovate born-accessible products and services to the broader population, which includes more than one billion people with disabilities worldwide.”