The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted in 1990 to protect those who are not ablebodied from various forms of discrimination. Some 27 years have passed since the ADA civil rights legislation was signed into law, yet there continue to be frequent building, pathway and parking violations that prevent equality for individuals who are physically disabled in some way.
Grant Acosta is working to solve this problem. As a graduate student at the U pursuing a master’s of information sciences and graduate certificate of business analytics at the David Eccles School of Business, he was working his way through college as a bartender when he met Ron Johnson, a certified ADA inspection specialist and owner of ADA Inspection Plus LLC.
Johnson later asked Acosta about geotagging, leading to a serendipitous partnership that evolved into a formal business partnership when the duo formed ADA Mobile Assessment Systems (ADAMAS) in May 2016 and applied to the Company Launch space at Lassonde Studios.
Their interest in creating lasting impact in the community through the use of geotagging technology made Acosta a perfect match for Johnson’s idea of creating “a device that a trained person can actually use and collect the data” with for ADA property evaluation.
With the integration of geolocation information systems software with a unique internal instrumentation device, the mobile assessment prototype is expected to make these sorts of evaluations much faster, more accurate and cost-efficient.
More articles like this in ‘Student Innovation @ the U!’
Find this article and a lot more in the 2018 “Student Innovation @ the U” report. The publication is presented by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute to celebrate student innovators, change-makers and entrepreneurs.
