Meet Dr. Julian Brinkley, a trailblazer at Clemson University's School of Computing and director of the DRIVE Lab, pioneering research at the nexus of Human Factors, Computer Science, and Automotive Engineering. Over two decades, he's dedicated his career to developing innovative technological solutions benefiting people with disabilities. Collaborating with the university, Dr. Brinkley's research has secured over $6 million for disability studies and projects.
As the visionary founder and CEO of Daedalus Cybernetics, Dr. Brinkley leads product design initiatives for the company and has recently introduced two innovative products, the Accessibility Research Platform (ARP) and MyUI.AI in the Apple store. ARP fosters broader involvement of individuals with disabilities in research, while MyUI.AI strives to make digital interfaces, from kiosks to household consumer products to autonomous vehicles, accessible to folks with disabilities.
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
Disabilities create everyday obstacles and challenges for individuals, their families, and communities to successfully and efficiently manage day-to-day activities, family relationships, transportation needs, and a productive work-life balance.
As the American population and the Baby Boomer generation continue to age and retire, communities must create new mobility and transportation options to assist the needs of our aging population. Communities will continue to transform and evolve home and workplace environments to create a more interactive, adaptive, and inclusive environment for aging and disabled members of society.
According to a recently published 2021 disability report retrieved from the American Community Survey (ACS), 58.9% of disabled people are unemployed, and 24.4% live below the poverty line.
As you will learn shortly, Daedalus’ product portfolio and target market segments showcase how Daedalus’ company will become a significant job creator for the disabled community.
Underserved Market Opportunity Pain Points and Market Opportunities for Consumer Product Companies
Additional challenges arise for disabled people that consumer and home appliance companies could mutually benefit from. Most consumer product designers and manufacturers lack testing pools to adapt and modify their products for disabled people to utilize effectively and purchase. This creates bottlenecks to bringing to market (refrigerators, home audio/video products, etc.) products that serve diverse levels of potential disabled customers that can benefit both the disabled community and product designers and manufacturers' bottom line.
With the explosion of AI, communications, and autonomous vehicle technologies over the last decade, American society is undergoing a radical technological shift. Technologies and software are creating novel tools, products, and solutions to overcome many barriers related to aging, disability, and transportation. Daedalus Cybernetics is a cutting-edge technology and software company positioned to scale and profit significantly (as is the public) from their SaaS and HaS inventions.
There are three different market segments in the disability landscape that Daedalus Cybernetics and its subsidiary companies, ARP and MyUI, aim to serve.
Self-Checkout Kiosks:
Retailers are increasingly adopting self-checkout kiosks to enhance customer experience, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce operational costs. These kiosks are found in grocery stores, malls, and big-box retailers. They allow customers to independently scan, bag, and pay for their items, speeding up the checkout process and offering more control over their shopping journey.
Smart Home Appliances:
The smart home appliance sector, an emerging market within consumer appliances, offers devices that can connect to the internet, the cloud, or other devices and technologies for remote control and automation. These appliances, like smart thermostats, refrigerators, microwaves, sensors, and security systems aim to increase home convenience, efficiency, and energy conservation and monitoring protection.
Autonomous Ridesharing:
Autonomous ridesharing is set to transform personal transportation by offering on-demand rides using self-driving vehicles. These vehicles navigate autonomously using wireless, cloud, and IoT technologies like sensors, radar, and AI, eliminating the need for human drivers and promising a new era of convenience, actionable big data, and safety in the transportation ecosystem.
Daedalus has developed multiple B2B, B2E, and B2C strategies and beta product technologies to enter and establish product market fit in the above-mentioned three markets. Further details will be shared with investors in upcoming webinars during this fundraising campaign.
Product Solution 1: MyUI.ai
MyUI.ai is a cloud-based system that leverages artificial intelligence to adapt the digital interfaces of consumer appliances, kiosks, and nearly any compatible IoT device to the specific interaction needs of people with disabilities (PWD). The beta version of MyUI product has recently been completed and launched in the Apple store.
From a practical perspective, this means that an interface that, as a default, only supports touch or tactile interaction may now support gestures, eye gaze, affect, and/or voice commands. The user interface (UI) adaptation further extends to the visual elements of the UI and involves adaptations of interface colors, contrast, font size, spacing, button size, and layout.
MyUI enables people with disabilities to interact with customized as opposed to default and potentially inaccessible digital interfaces. MyUI is a technology designed specifically for the use of persons with disabilities, but it may also be beneficial for those seeking a greater degree of personalization.
MyUI uses artificial intelligence's predictive power to adapt user interface content and support interaction modalities for compatible internet-connected devices in real-time.
Grants from the Clemson University Research Foundation and the South Carolina Research Authority have funded the project and product development.
Product Solution 2: Accessibility Research Platform (ARP)
The Accessibility Research Platform (ARP) is a digital platform designed to connect people with disabilities to the broader research, governmental, and product development communities… providing greater involvement, input, and inclusion with the disability community in the design process.
ARP helps researchers and companies more easily connect with disabled product testers and helps persons with disabilities have their voices heard in the product development phases. Additionally, through its web-based training platform, ARP leverages its pool of research participants to train technologists in accessibility. This ensures that companies don’t just have access to feedback from disabled users but that they know how to leverage and benefit the end users and society from such feedback and research.
The ARP project, to date, has been funded by grants from the South Carolina Research Authority and the Clemson University Research Foundation. ARP is going through beta product testing now. The beta version is in the Apple store and is set to onboard researchers and clients starting in January 2025.
Daedalus has initiated conversations with several university researchers and departments about using ARP in user studies.
Both of these products are complementary and compatible, providing a suite of options for researchers, product developers, consumer product companies, government researchers, and others.
The ARP pricing model is multimodal and offers different pricing tiers to serve multiple customer segments within the US academic university research community. Daedalus anticipates working with regional universities first in the South and Midwest that have recently collaborated with Dr. Brinkley and other Clemson faculty members. Expanding across the US university landscape will be a significant priority and focus area for the ARP platform and Daedalus during 2025.
MyUIs pricing model is also multimodal and similar to ARP with a hybrid fee structure that combines flat and recurring subscription fees plus processing.
Daedalus Cybernetics & MyUI Competitors Landscape
The competitive market comparison for Daedalus’ two initial products is fragmented, nascent, and still emerging. Daedalus management is unaware of a competitor offering a commercial or educational platform that serves the disabled community, consumer product designers, and manufacturers. Several technologically diverse wearable, communication and digital gadgets and technologies serve disabled (sensory or physical) customer segments.
Daedalus chose Be My Eyes, Recite Me, and Dotincorp for comparison. Each of these three companies develops app-based products; some also offer a service that assists the visually impaired in navigating transit systems and popular saved (in a person's smartphone) places to visit in a particular cityscape environment. Be My Eyes product is integrated with visual interpreters and other smartphone technology. However, most companies in the disability space offer a limited number of products and fewer offer services. All three privately held companies are estimated to generate between $2-5M in yearly revenue. Making an apple-to-apple comparison for Daedalus’ first two products is challenging.
Based upon previous research studies reviewed and conducted by Dr. Brinkley, the disabled community customer considers five core attributes when making a purchasing decision. The attributes are price, disability diversity, accessibility, application, and assistance.
Daedalus is set to formally launch its first two products during the start of its Wefunder raise in Q1 of 2025. Daedalus is actively pursuing various customer entry points depending on its targeted customer segments in the research and consumer product communities. Daedalus must demonstrate product-market fit for its two products and raise additional capital to expand its core team and sales staff. Furthermore, Daedalus needs to complete the filing of its patent technology to protect its intellectual property during its first fundraising campaign.
Proposed Use of Funds
Daedalus Cybernetics fundraising campaign goal of $500K would create a 12-month runway for the company to:
Closing
Daedalus Cybernetics, MyUI, and ARP are groundbreaking companies, platforms, and innovative technology products that serve vastly underserved markets for both the disabled community and consumer product manufacturing companies.
Daedalus Cybernetics projects to be revenue-positive within 12-18 months of this Wefunder launch and is excited to bring its groundbreaking technologies to market with your help.
Join the Daedalus community by becoming an investor today!
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