Having a voice can cost special needs patients thousands of dollars a year, but it doesn’t have to, according to two Upstate entrepreneurs.
“We do not believe in charging families with special needs children large sums of money for something that can improve their quality of life,” said ExcepApps cofounder and Applied Behavior Analysis therapist Adam Kern. Kern and business partner Ryan Poplin founded ExcepApps as a low-cost therapy solution for special needs children with communication issues.
The company’s flagship product, AACcess, is a speech-generation application that also allows parents and specialists to track progress for a few dollars a month.
“We are already tracking language development over time in the forms of sentence length, vocabulary, commonly used phrases, and word length,” said Kern, who launched a crowdfunding campaign in February to finish the app’s development and fund data collection and storage. “We can see how these metrics change over the course of a day, an hour, a week, a month, a year, etc.”
While the company received initial investment through The Iron Yard’s Digital Health Accelerator, additional investment has been harder to secure. The pair have turned to crowdfunding to avoid bringing in outside investors, which could alter the direction of the company, he said.
ExcepApps has 4,000 existing users for its other application, Color Countdown, a visual timer designed to improve behavior by representing time through easily understood concepts such as colors and shapes.
ExcepApps was born when Kern noticed children using mobile technology themselves while he was doing the same thing with more complicated and expensive technology as a therapist to track progress.
“I thought, why can’t we combine the two together? Create apps that kids are already familiar with, but track a child’s development as they use it,” he said. Collecting data on development allows therapists and parents to easily locate areas of most improvement and where more work needs to be done, he said.
“Even insurance companies could benefit, because this data could prove the effectiveness of treatments they are paying for,” he said.
While both apps will be offered for free, the company still has to finish AACcess and pay for data hosting, which will be covered by the $10,000 the duo hopes to raise in less than a week.
“While working as a therapist, I saw families make tremendous sacrifices. They often pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to give their child the best chance to succeed. This includes spending thousands of dollars on technology,” said Kern. “This has to stop, and we intend to do something about it.”
