Technology for Autism Adults at Home

If you’ve ever stood in your kitchen trying to decide whether it’s safe to run to the grocery store for an hour while your adult child is home alone, you already know the exact feeling I’m talking about. That constant math could burn something, could she wander? Is this the day something goes wrong is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to people outside this world. In part two of my conversation with Mike Courtney of Daily Living Labs, we got into the nuts and bolts of what smart home technology for special needs adults actually looks like right now, not in some far-off future. We talked about safety audits done room by room, AI that keeps solution lists from going stale and where robots might realistically fit into a caregiver’s day. This isn’t theoretical. This is stuff families like mine are already piloting.

Key Points

• Smart home technology for special needs adults is finally catching up to what families actually need: Safety, independence and a life that isn’t just “fed and cared for,” but enriched.
• Daily Living Labs has vetted almost 2,000 real devices and solutions, organized room-by-room around three buckets, danger/risk, frustration/challenge and enrichment.
• AI is now being used to keep those solution lists current and to suggest tools families didn’t even know to ask about, similar to how Amazon suggests “people who bought this also liked.”
• Robots and smarter safety systems (like stoves that auto-shut-off) are close enough on the horizon that they’re worth planning for now, not someday.

Why is safety the first thing every parent asks about?

Because it’s the thing that keeps us up at night. Every parent of a special needs teen or adult wants two things that feel like they’re in tension with each other. Independence and safety. If your loved one has one-on-one care and that person is fully present, great, but that’s not sustainable or even desirable forever. You want your child or adult to be able to do more on their own, maybe with one caregiver watching two or three people instead of hand-holding every second.

Mike Courtney’s team has approached this by cataloging real, available solutions not concepts, not prototypes, actual products you can buy or use today. They’ve vetted almost 2,000 of them. But the bigger shift is how they think about safety. It’s not just “is this person going to hurt themselves.” Sometimes it’s about property, someone who can cook most days just fine, but there’s a real chance, maybe one time in twenty that something gets left on and it becomes a fire risk. That’s a legitimate worry and it deserves a legitimate technology answer, not just “don’t let them cook anymore.”

What does a room-by-room home safety assessment actually look like?

This part genuinely impressed me. Instead of a generic checklist, Daily Living Labs walks through a home room by room and asks three questions in each space:

• Where’s the danger or risk to the person or to the property?
• Where’s the frustration or challenge the stuff that’s technically possible but so hard it leads to giving up?
• Where’s the opportunity for enrichment because safety and survival aren’t the same thing as a meaningful life?

That third bucket is the one people forget. It’s easy to focus so hard on preventing disaster that you lose sight of the fact that being safe, fed and supervised isn’t actually living. My son’s dashboard, the one Dr. Nazir and his students showed us on our Zoom call, tracking data across all three of these areas: Safety, learning and enrichment over the course of a day and a week. That’s a very different picture than a single incident report.

Why is my autistic adult still stuck when solutions might already exist?

This is the “noseblindness” problem Mike Courtney talked about. As parents, we look for a solution, it isn’t there, we look again a year later, still isn’t there and eventually we just stop looking. We adapt. We work around it. We stop even registering it as a solvable problem.

The issue is that most of us don’t have the bandwidth to keep re-checking. That’s where AI is actually earning its keep here not as a gimmick, but as a research assistant that never gets tired or distracted. Daily Living Labs is using AI bots that continuously scan for new products and solutions, flag them for a human to confirm and add them to the list. So the list isn’t a snapshot from 2023 gathering dust, it’s alive. And because the system can infer patterns (“other families who needed this also found this helpful”), it can resurface things you gave up looking for years ago without you having to ask.

What can you do when services and staff just don’t exist?

This is the money question for most of us. There’s a real, documented gap. The number of people aging out of the school system and needing Medicaid waiver support (HCS, CLASS, whichever program your state uses) is growing faster than funding or staffing can keep up. That money doesn’t stretch as far as it needs to and it’s only going to get scarcer.

Mike Courtney’s answer isn’t “wait for more funding.” It’s “use technology to reduce the trade-offs you’re being forced to make.” A concrete example, a caregiver needs to run to the store for an hour, but a family member left alone might leave the stove on too long. Instead of that being an all-or-nothing risk, technology can put a guardrail in place the stove shuts off automatically or a camera detects the person has walked away and something’s starting to burn. Nobody’s freedom gets taken away, but the actual danger gets managed. That’s the whole philosophy. Shrink the risk without shrinking the independence.

What role will robots play in caregiving?

More than most people think and probably sooner than expected. Mike Courtney has been tracking robotics at CES and South By Southwest (SXSW) for years, and he pointed out how far things have come from robots falling over on YouTube five years ago to genuinely capable, nimble machines today.

For caregiving specifically that could mean something as simple as a robot retrieving an item from a top shelf for someone in a wheelchair or bringing in a package the delivery driver left on the step instead of the porch. Small stuff, but small stuff is a huge share of daily frustration for people with mobility or cognitive limitations.

The caution here is real too and I appreciated that Mike didn’t just sell the upside. Where are these robots made? Who controls the override? What happens if an AI system is told to “make the room cooler” and takes it too literally? We’re not just adopting devices, we’re going to have to teach systems what “appropriate” actually means for a specific human being and that’s not a solved problem yet.

How can families get involved with Daily Living Labs?

Right now, this is still very much a research and piloting effort, working through universities like UNT with reach into Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin. They’re actively looking for more families to participate in home assessments covering danger and risk, frustration and challenge and enrichment plus more universities, professors, students across engineering, UI/UX, design, business and even hobbyist makers and hackers who like to tinker.

Mike Courtney’s vision is a community model, not a charity gala model of people contributing ideas, time and solutions to help each other, whether or not they personally have a background in disability services. If you’re outside Texas, it doesn’t matter. This is meant to work virtually and connect people locally wherever they are.

What You’ll Learn

• Why room-by-room safety assessments give a clearer picture than a single checklist
• How AI is being used to keep solution databases current instead of going stale
• What “noseblindness” is and why it causes families to stop looking for help that might now exist
• How smart home technology can reduce caregiver risk without reducing a loved one’s independence
• Where robotics realistically fit into caregiving in the near term and where the real risks are
• How Medicaid waiver dollars (HCS, CLASS) are being stretched by rising demand and what that means for families
• How to get involved with Daily Living Labs, whether or not you’re in Texas

Notable Quotes

• “Where’s the danger or risk? To humans or to property.” -Mike Courtney (01:38)
• “Eliminate the danger and risk, try to overcome the frustrations and challenges, but then where can we enrich their life?” -Mike Courtney (03:10)
• “These daily living labs in part are to give you hope to say the things you may have given up on may now be possible.” -Mike Courtney (06:03)
• “The money is hard to get a hold of. It doesn’t go as far as it wants to go, and it’s going to be even scarcer in the future than in the past.” -Mike Carr (07:21)
• “The system, the home, was there to be a second set of eyes, ears and instruction to help that person keep them calm, keep them company.” -Mike Courtney (08:58)
• “We’ve got to make sure that it doesn’t do things that you’re like, wait a minute.” -Mike Courtney (12:24)
• “Instead of thinking about what all these technologies are going to do to us… let me show you what I’m going to do to and for the world with it.” -Mike Courtney (17:48)
• “There won’t really be much of a difference between those with issues and challenges and those who have ideas or can contribute to solving them.” Mike Courtney (16:12)

Resources & Links

• Daily Living Labs (dailylivinglabs.com) – the hub for the room-by-room home assessment framework and the growing database of vetted assistive solutions.
• Aperio Insights (mike@aperioinsights.com) – Mike Courtney’s direct contact for families or academic partners who want to get involved.
• University of North Texas (UNT) research teams – the academic partner currently running pilots with families in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin areas.
• State Medicaid Waiver Programs (HCS, CLASS or your state’s equivalent) – the funding source most families rely on for home modifications and support services.
• Autism Labs (mike@autismlabs.com) – where you can reach Mike Carr directly with questions or to share your own family’s situation.

Timestamped Outline

• 00:05  Recap of last week’s episode and introduction to part two
• 01:00 The independence vs. safety balance every parent faces
• 01:38 The three-bucket framework: danger/risk, frustration/challenge, enrichment
• 03:43 The family dashboard demo with Dr. Nazir and students
• 04:33 Keeping the solutions list current instead of letting it go stale
• 07:21 The funding gap: Medicaid waiver dollars and rising demand
• 08:20 Managing trade-offs: the “grandpa home alone” scenario
• 10:06 Where robotics are headed for caregiving
• 13:02 How to get in touch and get involved with Daily Living Labs
• 17:48 Closing thoughts: taking agency over technology instead of fearing it

FAQ

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Transcription:

Mike Carr (00:05): Well, welcome back. Last week we started talking to Mike Courtney, who founded Daily Living Labs he’s a futurist, angel investor, and professor. This week we’re continuing that conversation about the practical technology changes you can make in your home to keep your special needs child or adult safer, help them do more independently, and enrich their lives. We’ll also cover how to get in touch with Mike if you’d like to participate, or just learn more about what he and his students are working on.

Every parent is concerned with safety. We want our special needs teens and adults to be as independent as possible, but we also want to make sure they’re safe. If they have one-on-one care and the caregiver is fully attentive and someone you trust, great but ideally they could be doing more on their own, maybe with just one caregiver for two or three people instead of one-on-one. What have you seen whether it’s a temperature sensor on a stove or a lock on a fridge that’s approachable, available, and not too expensive? What are you optimistic about right now?

Mike Courtney (01:38): We’ve had professors and their students collect solutions from various sources and repositories. We’re up to almost 2,000 vetted items now, real products that actually exist and are available today. We’ve also built a framework to do a room-by-room assessment of a home. For each room, you ask: where’s the danger or risk, to the person or to the property? Sometimes it’s not that someone will harm themselves, but they might damage the property someone who cooks fine most days, but one time in twenty there’s a real risk of leaving something on. That’s a legitimate concern.

Then there’s frustration or challenge things I wish I could do, or technically could do, but it’s so difficult that I give up and let someone else do it instead. Solving that delivers real independence and freedom. The third bucket is enrichment. Even if someone is safe and their frustrations are handled, what’s left? The goal isn’t just “they’re safe, fed, and cared for” while bored, that’s not really living. So we go room by room, mapping issues, frustrations, and enrichment opportunities to devices, technologies, or even routines and best practices because it’s not always about a gadget.

Mike Carr (03:43): When we had the Zoom call with Dr. Nazir and half a dozen of his students, they showed us a dashboard with a variety of data inputs synced together, giving us data points throughout the day and week specific to our son across those three domains: safety, learning, and enrichment. We also talked about what’s coming next semester or next year. Do you keep expanding that list of nearly 2,000 items, or are you narrowing it down to a top ten? What do you think you and your team will be working on over the next six to eighteen months?

Mike Courtney (04:41): We don’t want to collect this once and let it go stale. We’ve taken an AI-centric approach. AI bots periodically search for new solutions, add them to the list, or surface them to a human for confirmation. So the lists stay current. We’re also evolving toward inferring needs if you’ve indicated certain things are useful to you, and other people with similar needs also found a related item helpful, we can suggest it, similar to how Amazon suggests items based on what other buyers picked.

That includes things people have given up on. Over years of searching without success, most of us become “noseblind”. We stop looking because we’ve learned there’s no solution. But this system can surface things and say, “This is now available, is it of interest?” Sometimes the answer is, “We looked for that years ago and gave up.” That’s the point of Daily Living Labs to give people hope that things they’ve given up on may now be possible.

Mike Carr (06:28): One challenge, beyond staying current, is that no parent has time to constantly monitor for new solutions. Using AI to do that research is genuinely helpful. The other issue is the scarcity of human talent and the cost that comes with it. We’ve talked about this before on the podcast. We’re trying to reduce cost and increase efficiency of spending. Parents often have Medicaid waiver dollars, like HCS or CLASS funding, with restrictions on how it can be used, and they want to use it as effectively as possible. There’s only so much money, and we know more people are aging out of the school system and needing that funding than currently receive it. That’s a proven trend. The money is hard to get, doesn’t stretch far enough, and will be even scarcer going forward. At the same time, we want to enrich lives and keep people safe. What’s your philosophy on the balance between cost, efficiency, impact, and outcome? Efficiency might mean saving time or making a therapist more productive, but outcome is the enriched life the joy, excitement, the learning. What’s your take on where this is headed?

Mike Courtney (08:20): It comes down to understanding context and trade-offs. We’ve talked to families where a parent can no longer think the way they used to, and their adult child worries about even simple things “I need to go to the grocery store, but I’m afraid to leave Grandpa alone.” What might happen? There are dangers, but you’ll only be gone an hour. Those are edge cases, but real ones, so there’s a trade-off to weigh.

Can technology manage that trade-off? Maybe the stove can’t run more than ten minutes unsupervised, or a camera detects that he’s walked away and something is starting to burn, and shuts it off automatically. That way you’re not putting anyone at risk or restricting their ability to do things you’re just adding guardrails so the caregiver has confidence to do what they need to do, whether that’s take a work call, care for someone else in the family, or just take a break. The home becomes a second set of eyes and ears, helping keep the person calm and safe, so those trade-offs feel much smaller.

Mike Carr (10:06): You’ve always been excited about robotics, and I know at CES and South By Southwest you pay close attention to that space. What do you see on the horizon for the role robots could play in a scenario like keeping Grandpa or your child safe while you run to the store? Are there use cases people don’t normally think about that we should be paying attention to?

Mike Courtney (10:39): Robots are going to change the game in a big way. Five or six years ago, the videos online showed robots that were clumsy and falling over. Today, they’re practically gymnasts doing parkour, backflips, much more nimble and less fragile. As a caregiving component, that could mean something as simple as retrieving an item from a top shelf in the fridge for someone in a wheelchair, or bringing in a package a delivery driver left on the step instead of the porch.

In the near term, they’ll still be expensive, though costs will come down. But we also have to think about where these robots come from. Is there an override? Could someone in another country activate a fleet of robots simultaneously? Even if we limit humanoid robots to certain trusted companies or countries for security reasons, someone will still buy a cheaper, unauthorized version, and we don’t know what those might do. As a futurist, that’s the job looking at the possibilities and the unintended consequences. Robots and AI don’t yet fully understand what’s truly appropriate for a given situation. If you ask an AI to cool off a hot room, it might take the roof off technically cooler, but not what you meant. It’ll get better, but we have to watch for those gotchas.

Mike Carr (13:02): If someone wants to get in touch with you you mentioned doing home safety audits and understanding a family’s specific situation, and that you’re working with academia and students across multiple university departments rather than selling a product yet. Where should people go for more information an email, a webpage?

Mike Courtney (13:39): There are a few ways. You can go to dailylivinglabs.com and reach out through the site. My email is mike@aperioinsights.com Aperio is spelled A-P-E-R-I-O, so aperioinsights.com. I’m based in Dallas, Texas, and I’m pretty easy to find online.

We’re looking for more families to participate in the next wave of research and piloting, to help flesh out how all the parts and pieces work not just the safety and danger-risk piece, but overcoming frustrations and adding enrichment too. Think of it almost like Best Buy’s Geek Squad. If you need your TV set up or your computer rebooted, you call them. We’re moving toward standing up our own service organization to help families figure out what’s needed room by room, how it all comes together, get it installed and configured, and then help maintain it, since not everyone is technical.

Right now we’re still proving things out with pilots and proofs of concept, and we’re looking for more universities, professors engineering, UI/UX, design, industrial design, 3D printing, business students, all of it plus hackers, makerspace folks, and tinkerers who like to invent. We hope within the next year to really promote this and bring in dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people who both have needs and are willing to help solve problems for others. I don’t think there’ll be much difference between people with challenges and people with ideas to contribute. Contributing doesn’t mean writing a check. It means an idea, your time, your thinking. I want this to be a community that solves its own issues, not an organization built around a big annual gala raising sponsorship dollars.

Mike Carr (16:42): That sounds great. For any parent listening, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area since UNT is based there but has also expanded down to Austin you’ve helped one other family here in Austin already. So right now it’s boots on the ground in Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin, but if there are other universities, professors, or folks elsewhere who’d like to start something in their local area, you’d be open to talking with them too, and they can visit dailylivinglabs.com or email you at mike@aperioinsights.com. We’ll put that in the show notes so people get the spelling right.

To close out if you had one or two key takeaways for parents of special needs individuals, whether it’s something to watch for or a reason for hope, what would you want to leave them with?

Mike Courtney (17:48): We’re living in genuinely amazing times. It’s challenging because things are moving fast, and a lot of people worry about what AI will or won’t do. I think we have to take action and have agency instead of thinking about what these technologies are going to do to us, like we just have to sit and take it, we need to flip the script and say, “Here’s what I’m going to do with it, for the world.” Use it as a tool to go out and do the good we need and deserve, instead of waiting for something to happen to us. This is an exciting time to take charge of these technologies and use them for good.

If you’re a parent, caregiver, or someone with a disability it doesn’t matter to me if you’re in Texas, California, Alaska, Florida, or Germany. Reach out. This is a global concept. We don’t need to be there physically, we can do this virtually, find local people to help, and build these systems out. There’s no better time than now. If we’d tried this ten years ago, it might have worked, but it’s far more possible now because AI helps us connect the dots and do the grunt work, leaving the things only humans can do to the humans. I think we’re going to do amazing things with it, things we all deserve and will benefit from.

Mike Carr (19:19): Amen. And I’d add AI is a lot easier to use now than it was even six months ago. The most recent release of ChatGPT can do a lot with minimal prompting, and Claude Cowork is out there if you’re a Claude fan, with Gemini reportedly introducing new features soon too. Even if you tried AI three or six months ago and found it frustrating, it’s gotten a lot better and easier. The free versions aren’t bad, but for about $20 a month, you can do some amazing things.

As Mike said, he’s here to help, and if you’d like to reach me directly, my email is mike@autismlabs.com. Both of us are very interested in helping parents of special and complex needs kids and teens, really anyone with a heart and an interest in this space. Mike, thank you so much for your time today. And to everyone listening and watching, stay tuned we’ll have another episode of Autism Labs in a week or two. Thanks again. Bye-bye.