How Jason Barnes and others are leading the way to a more accessible world made with – not just for – the disabled community.
6-minute read
Jason Barnes has loved playing drums since he was a little boy. This didn’t change when he lost his arm in an electrical accident at the age of 22. Nearly 10 years later, Jason’s passion for music has led to the creation of one of the most advanced prosthetic limbs in the world. Today, he is one of millions of people with disabilities who are doing what they love.
Technology that’s designed in partnership with the disability community is ultimately more useful for everyone. More and more, people in the disability community are the co-creators of the tools that are helping them and others pursue their goals and live the lives they want.
Opening the door for invention
Jason Barnes started drumming before he could talk. “I remember when he was 2 years old,” says his mother, Maggie. “Whenever we put music on, he’d start banging on his high chair or the dinner table or whatever he could get his hands on.” In 2012, when he was 22, Jason’s right hand was amputated after an electrical accident. This event began a new chapter in his life.
Since 2013, Jason has been working with Gil Weinberg, a renowned roboticist and founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, to develop the world’s most advanced robotic drumming arm. Their latest design uses Google’s open source machine learning platform, TensorFlow.
Jason’s arm operates using EMG, or electromyography, which means that sensors in the prosthesis pick up electrical signals from the residual limb. When Jason activates muscles to flex or extends his arm, the prosthesis reacts accordingly.
Jason and the team at Georgia Tech doing gesture recognition and training.
Jason can play intuitively with his prosthesis because it allows him to feel the feedback from the drumsticks, just like his own arm would.
Jason testing a prototype of the prosthesis.
Jason and his longtime partner, Amanda Dearborn.
“Making technology available and accessible to all allows for greater and faster innovation.”
Sarah Sirajuddin, engineering lead for Google’s TensorFlow team
Machine learning can perform tasks that traditionally required human intelligence such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation. “Our ultimate goal is to design it so that anyone could use it as easily as they might use Gmail,” says Sarah Sirajuddin, engineering lead for Google’s TensorFlow team. “The more accessible the technology is, the more we empower people to build their own solutions.”
Rather than completing a design and sending it to Jason to test after the fact, Gil worked with him in the lab to iterate on versions of the arm as they were being built. For Jason, this was a new experience.
See how TensorFlow is helping blind athletes run independently.
“I felt lucky to be a part of this process. In the past, there has always been a learning curve with me having to adjust to a new device. But this way, it was the device that was adjusted to me.”
Jason Barnes
Working together to build better
“If you’ve never used assistive technology to help, how would you know how to design a product that would make best use of those assistive technologies? The answer is you wouldn’t.”
Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google
Collaboration with the disability community is a fundamental part of the design process at Google – whether it’s collaborating on a new piece of technology to fill a specific need or iterating to improve a core tool.
Since 2018, nearly 1,000 participants have recorded over 1,000 hours of speech samples as part of Project Euphonia. The project was created to help people with speech impairments be better understood by voice-activated tools like Google Assistant. Currently, many speech recognition models are not trained on the voices of people with speech impairments, because there isn’t enough data available. To solve this, the team has collaborated with partners like the ALS TDI (ALS Therapy Development Institute) to gather the data needed to make speech recognition more accessible. For participants, the project offers an opportunity to help shape the future of speech recognition, not just for themselves but also for the millions of people who have speech disorders globally.
ALS technologist Steve Saling working with the Project Euphonia team. Find out how you can record your voice to help.
In 2017, Google enlisted the support of millions of contributors worldwide known as Local Guides, to crowdsource accessibility information for Google Maps. Today, information on wheelchair accessibility is available on over 15 million places in Maps. You can see it by clicking on the two-line description of a location on Maps and scrolling to “Accessibility Information.” Thanks to a growing network of Local Guides, business owners, and other contributors around the world, more information is being added every day to help people go where they need to go with confidence.
In 2017, Google enlisted the support of millions of contributors worldwide known as Local Guides, to crowdsource accessibility information for Google Maps. Today, information on wheelchair accessibility is available on over 15 million places in Maps. You can see it by clicking on the two-line description of a location on Maps and scrolling to “Accessibility Information.” Thanks to a growing network of Local Guides, business owners, and other contributors around the world, more information is being added every day to help people go where they need to go with confidence.
“Access to information gives the possibility of independence and freedom. Why not give that same opportunity to people with disabilities?”
Luis Durán, Local Guide, Santo Domingo, DO
“Access to information gives the possibility of independence and freedom. Why not give that same opportunity to people with disabilities?”
Luis Durán, Local Guide, Santo Domingo, DO
Paying it forward – the butterfly effect
What you can do to help
Your action matters. Here are some things you can do to help build a more accessible world.
What Google is doing
Find out about Google’s commitment to hiring and supporting employees with disabilities.
1World Health Organization, World Report on Disability, 2011
