The new start-up will focus on creating technology-based solutions for people with motor limitations.
Zyrobotics, a Georgia Institute of Technology start-up, has launched out of the university with support from the institution’s incubator Venturelab.
Zyrobotics will provide technology-based enabling solutions for people with mild to severe motor limitations. The start-up’s aim is to develop products that are adaptive to each individual’s capabilities – for children, its products will uniquely focus on accessible play. The company’s first product offerings include switch-to-tablet interactive toys, interactive robots, and a suite of gaming apps that are specially designed to enable such accessible play.
The company was founded by Ayanna Howard, who also serves as Chief Technology Officer. Howard is a roboticist and currently the Motorola Foundation Professor at the institute’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.Howard obtained a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Southern California University in 1999, and is the founder of the Human-Automation Systems Laboratory. She has previously worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). At JPL, she headed research on various robotic projects utilising vision, fuzzy logic, and neural network methodologies, leading the MIT Technology Review to list her as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. To date, she has received 14 awards and honours, with her participation in the National Science Foundation I-Corps programme being responsible for the founding of Zyrobotics.
Howard said: “The demand for assistive technology among people with motor limitations continues to grow significantly and is much bigger than we originally imagined. Our technologies provide access to play opportunities for children in particular, which is so important for their social, cognitive and physical development goals, as well as extending to adults with disabilities including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and stroke.
