Gizmodo 
Enter your username and password.
Tip your editors:
tips@gizmodo.com
Editorial Director:
Brian Lam | Email | Twitter
Editor:
Jason Chen
Email | AIM | Twitter
Features Editor:
Wilson Rothman
Email | Twitter
Senior Contributing Editors:
Jesus Diaz
Email | AIM | Twitter
Mark Wilson, Reviews
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editors:
Matt Buchanan
Email | AIM | Twitter
Adam Frucci
Email | Twitter
Sean Fallon
Email | Twitter
Jack Loftus
Email | Twitter
John Herrman
Email | Twitter
Dan Nosowitz
Email
Chris Mascari
Email
Danny Allen
Email | Twitter
Rosa Golijan
Email | Twitter
Chris Jacob
Email
Columnist:
Brendan I. Koerner
Interns:
Don Nguyen
Email
Kyle VanHemert
Email
Comment Intern:
Nick Ellenoff | Email
Comment Account Questions:
Comments@gizmodo.com
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/06/09
Ppppffffff. Everyone knows the future of health care is... The Nozzle
10/06/09
Who's got the biggest melanoma of them all?"
10/06/09
10/06/09
10/06/09
10/06/09
09/15/09
09/15/09
User adoption is a big problem for devices like this, especially with kids who already have hangups about looking or feeling different. I would think that a child with a program like this might end up wanting to use it more simply because its on a device all the other kids are carrying and can be used for other things like music or videos. And from a Medicare cost standpoint, it's obviously cheap. Why should this be an administrative problem?
09/15/09
Ladies and Gents, I present to you a fleeting glimpse of your grandchildrens' future, in dollars, being spent this very second on inane acquisitions like this one.
09/15/09
I go to bat for my patients PERSONALLY each and every day I work, and I will spend 4 hours that I'm not going to get paid for to make sure one patient gets the care they need to save their life.
Will nObama do this for you? Will a lawyer do this for you (4 hours they KNOW they're not getting paid for???). Would a f***ing PLUMBER do this for you?
I would Rx this iphone app, AND the iphone, to most of my autistic kids. Not only the app is useful, but the iphone interface is uniquely suited to really augment their daily life in a really positive way and improve their overall QOL.
Why dontcha y'all vote for ME next time around??
09/15/09
09/15/09
Imagine if they started buying general purpose systems for everyone. They buy good, but inexpensive computers that don't have good support for the disability community.
You can't go to one provider for support - you have to go to Apple if the iPhone fails, the software maker if the software fails - if you can figure out which is which... and so on.
Then the Republicans and anti-government people jump in and start yelling 'entitlements' and how the government is giving poor people 'expensive toys' the rest of us can't afford and so on...
The someone's voicebox is found to have porn on it - and the yelling gets louder and louder...
Ironically, this article itself is kind of why things are the way they are. It's easy to look at something without any surrounding context and make it into a big moral point... but the very act of doing that creates the moral point one complains about.
09/15/09
09/15/09
09/15/09
09/15/09
The devices simply HAVE to be single purpose. They can't do anything else. A lower functioning individual with developmental disabilities has no use for the other features on the phone, and if there was a complicated process for accessing the TTS features, then it defeats the purpose if they don't know how to get to it.
Additionally, my sister was prone to throwing her TTS around when she was upset. See how long an iphone/touch lasts under those conditions. Miraculously, she only went through a couple of them, because they were sturdily built.
You just don't get it.
09/15/09
I think the reason this gets people charged, though, is not that "the iPhone can do it". Though, throwing the collective Apple lust into this argument is probably the worst way to handle it. The real issue, though, is that, as you said, $8000 *is* crazy.
DynaVox, the company that makes this stuff said in the NYTimes article that they charge so much (as much as a 2000 percent markup) because they essentially have to make the software from scratch. And that may be so. Niche software usually costs much more than popular software, admittedly. But if there is that big of a gap between competing products (and they are competing), and the hardware is much the same, one has to ask if there's a better way serve those who need it.
I don't know the solution, but in my experience, there's always a way to save money. This may be one place to look.
09/15/09
Also, the capabilities of touchboards haven't changed much over the years, even though the hardware and technology driving them has. My sister's first board was basically a digital recorder with a large grid of buttons. There's no reason that the vast majority of people using them need much more than this, and that technology is a lot cheaper now than it was 20 years ago. So I have the feeling that these companies upgrade the hardware to keep the costs up, and that's another contributing factor.
but really, most of these boards are "push the button, play a word/phrase"
How hard can it be? Why even bring the iphone into it?
09/15/09
Between the added cost of fraud and investigating said fraud, they *might* end up saving money by just going with the far more expensive option. I'm not saying it does, just that it sounds possible and so I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions.
I'm sure its better anyways, the iphone has an awful small screen and so a proper tablet-sized computer likely is a bit easier to use.
09/15/09
OK, Don't buy the hardware. Just cover the software. That's the part that turns the general-purpose metal into what the patient needs!
09/15/09