Additional Initiatives

The Autism & Communication Technology Initiative utilizes the unique features of the Media Lab to foster the development of innovative technologies that can enhance and accelerate the pace of autism research and therapy. Researchers are especially invested in creating technologies that promote communication and independent living by enabling non-autistic people to understand the ways autistic people are trying to communicate; improving autistic people's ability to use receptive and expressive language along with other means of functional, non-verbal expression; and providing telemetric support that reduces reliance on caregivers' physical proximity, yet still enables enriching and natural connectivity as wanted and needed.

Most of us are awash in consumer electronics (CE) devices: from cell phones, to TVs, to dishwashers. They provide us with information, entertainment, and communications, and assist us in accomplishing our daily tasks. Unfortunately, most are not as helpful as they could and should be; for the most part, they are dumb, unaware of us or our situations, and often difficult to use. In addition, most CE devices cannot communicate with our other devices, even when such communication and collaboration would be of great help. The Consumer Electronics 2.0 initiative (CE 2.0) is a collaboration between the Media Lab and its sponsor companies to formulate the principles for a new generation of consumer electronics that are highly connected, seamlessly interoperable, situation-aware, and radically simpler to use. Our goal is to show that as computing and communication capability seep into more of our everyday devices, these devices do not have to become more confusing and complex, but rather can become more intelligent in a cooperative and user-friendly way.

Within the next several years, another billion people will make regular use of cell phones, continuing the fastest adoption of a new technology in history. This will unleash a wave of entrepreneurship, collaboration, and wealth creation, thereby transforming this Next Billion into a powerful force in the global economy. By innovating applications and business models, and by testing them locally in the field, this initiative explores how mobile technologies can reduce friction in bottom-of-the-pyramid markets across the developing world.

Instead of building on a reactive health-care system centered around treating disease rather than preventing it, the Lab's new Social Health Initiative is focused on developing a proactive, social health system: a network of organizations and tools to give people the knowledge and support they need to maintain health, vitality, and happiness throughout their entire lives. This involves developing devices such as mobile phones that record our daily patterns and smart exercise equipment that knows our personal patterns and life-style goals. This initiative will integrate: persuasive technologies, to help us make better decisions and adopt better behaviors; personal sensing, to increase our awareness of our bodies; personal collective intelligence, for collect knowledge from our peers; and socially aware computation and communication systems that are aware of us as social beings.