A profoundly deaf employee at IBM UK Hursley Labs was worried because he could not hear the fire alarms. IBM had installed a flashing light near his desk but this was of no use when he was in other parts of the campus. Because Hursley Lab's mission includes innovation, mobile and messaging, it was not long before employees built a prototype solution. The fire alarm system was modified to send a short message service (SMS) message directly to the deaf employee’s mobile phone. The phone vibrates, the employee reads the message and replies to confirm that the message was received and the appropriate action taken. To be effective, however, the system had to be a little more sophisticated, the main requirement being the need to recognize when the employee is on campus and when he was not. After all, an SMS in the middle of the night on a trip to New York, reporting a practice drill in Hursley would hardly be useful! The ability to subscribe to different types of messages (fire alarms and public address announcements, for example) made the system even more useful.
Four students at Hursley Labs further developed the prototype as part of the company's Extreme Blue research program. The prototype system is now called Location Aware Messaging for Accessibility (LAMA).
Having proved the technology, it was obvious that the solution had a much wider potential market than just one profoundly deaf employee at Hursley Lab. For example, in a LAMA-enabled train station a deaf traveler could receive the public address announcements as text, so they would know about delays or platform changes. It could also provide more specific messages such as, “Your next train to Winchester will leave from platform 9 at 10:15.”
Having changed trains at Clapham Junction (the busiest and most complex station in the United Kingdom) on my way to Hursley, I would have greatly appreciated a similar message even though I am not hard of hearing or in any significant way disabled. My ideal solution would be to plan the route on the Internet, download it to my LAMA phone so that upon arrival at Clapham, my phone would alert the station LAMA system of my requirements and respond with directions to the fastest train to Winchester. Vision impaired travelers could also benefit from this solution if the messages were sent as audio. The message could include directions between the platforms and an immediate message when arriving at the entrance to a specific platform.
The LAMA-enabling system would benefit nearly any public facility: train stations, airports, shopping centers, hospitals, museums, etc. In addition to improving accessibility, LAMA can provide welcome information about a site for anyone with the equipment. This widening of the market is essential to make the infrastructure economically viable. Some organizations may install LAMA because it is the socially responsible thing to do but most will consider it if it improves the experience of the majority of their clients.
Thus, LAMA is an example of a solution built to meet a specific accessibility requirement (one deaf employee) that turned into a new general-purpose solution. This suggests that assistive technology industries should be looking at specialist solutions to determine how they could be generalized to the benefit of the original users as well as the broader community.
May I suggest as a small step in that direction: IBM keeps the acronym but changes the meaning from Location Aware Messaging for Accessibility to Location Aware Messaging for All.
