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- Well then, I'm Gene.

- And I'm Dave.

- And we're the Gene-

- Gene and Dave show.

- It's a pleasure today RJ Cooper with us all the way from California. Now RJ has been working in Assistive Technology for what was it 30, 40 years, RJ?

- Right in that pocket there, 37 years now.

- Wow okay. Well RJ how did you get started in Assistive Technology?

- I was studying Computer Science with Digital Emphasis up at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. After coming down from the mountains with a short career of teaching skiing and teaching tennis in Park City, Utah. And wanted to do something a little more meaningful in life. So when I went back to school I wanted to do something with my schooling that was a bit different than everybody else was doing. And I came across the then novel idea of using computers for people with special needs. At that time, IBM hadn't released their PC yet. Mac was not really on, the wavelengths out there although it was, in creation. And companies like Commodore, Apple of course Texas Instruments, Osborne Computers sort of the first generation, of microcomputers was out there vying for the attention of the public. And Apple got the biggest interest out there. And so I got ahold of an Apple II, and started programming and realized that I could really be unique, appreciated, use my talents and enjoyed that time in Salt Lake City where people looked at me as, a valuable resource. And nothing a guy loves more than a pat on the back. That's how I got started, it was just a yearning on my part to do something different with the technology that I was studying.

- Yeah the technology was so new then. I mean, you kinda had to, you had to blaze your own path, right? To kinda-

- Oh, totally true. Most people didn't know they didn't know what a computer was. The idea of a doctor using a computer was absurd.

- Yeah.

- Now there's a computer on every desk and sometimes in every room. But, the most people thought of a computer was for the military, the IBM 3670 where a computer takes up a whole room and they use it for missile defense or something. So it was a very hard sell even to businesses that computers were on the upswing.

- Well, did you have some kind of special schooling background to learn Assistive Technology?

- No, there were only, at that time I was not in, the academic area. I was only interested in the creating things myself. Finding a few small resources out there companies that were actually doing something. Finding some academic articles and working locally with people in Salt Lake City and eventually all through Utah that needed me. People that would call the university and say "We have a son that dot, dot, dot." And then the university of Utah actually would send me out as an undergrad, with my Apple IIe computer and try to do different things that hopefully I wouldn't screw up too badly. That's exactly what happened. And I was the resident expert technologist in special needs with a zero training in special needs whatsoever.

- So can you give us some examples of how you used the technology back then?

- Sure. One of the first ones I did there were two outside here. One is a little boy named Adam and he had Pervasive Developmental Delay which means that he had an intellectual delay but nobody really knew why at that time. So I show up at this doorstep, the mom had called and I come in, she introduces me to a young Adam and I tell the mom I'm gonna teach him to speak. He was eight years old and he had, no voice to his name. He was totally physically fine but cognitively he wasn't speaking and he wasn't behaving like a typical young eight year old as he was at that time. And I made the bold statement thinking as an engineer that I'm going to fix everything, that's what engineers do. And I promised mom that I was gonna get him to speak. Of course, this was absurd what I was saying but I made that claim. So, I wanted him to speak so I thought the best way would be through a game. So I created a game on the Apple where you move a rabbit through a maze using the left, right, up and down arrow keys. And when he gets to the maze he gets to eat the carrot on the other side. It was a very rudimentary game with very rudimentary graphics but I thought that his mind could grasp the game. And I purchased the voice recognition card from a company down here in Irvine where I ended up finally. And carted down, I drove down, to Irvine from Salt Lake City. I begged the president of the company that this was gonna be a very big market for him that I was opening up, and he gave me a voice recognition board that fit inside the Apple IIe computer that I had. And when I got back to Salt Lake, I wrote the game and integrated the voice recognition for sounds E, A, O and L, those were my four directions. And I got a little microphone, a ball microphone that's the microphone with a shaft and a ball at the end. And I brought it over to Adam's house and I demonstrated it. The mom was ecstatic thinking that he's gonna... Anybody could do E, A, O and L, this is gonna be a breeze. What a great step forward for Adam. So I demonstrated E, A, O and L and how the rabbit moved through the maze. And I explained it to young Adam that's what we were gonna do and I handed him the microphone. Well, he opened his mouth really wide which I thought to say, 'A' and I thought, this is gonna work, I'm a genius. Well, he kept the microphone moving towards his mouth until it entered his mouth. And then he closed his mouth with the ball of the microphone inside of his mouth. And just the shaft protruding from his mouth. And I realized in that split millisecond I need to go back to school and learn about special needs. I went from hero to zero in a second.

- Yeah, it became a lolly pop at that point.

- Exactly what it was.

- Yeah.

- And then over the course of the next six months I never did get him to speak. We did get them to under some sounds with some different methodologies than that once I started learning about special Ed, speech and language, voicing, understanding, cognition. I moved down to Salt Lake, I moved down to the Irvine area that fall. I went back to school full time for Developmental Psychology and tried to learn the things that I was missing. Meanwhile, I was connecting up with local Special Ed schools and they were allowing me to come in with my equipment and try different things with their populations. So, I learned sort of boots on the ground in the school area while I was going to school and it was a great combination.

- That was a clever idea. I think you had the, A, E, U with corresponding to the arrows that's too bad it didn't work out. That would have been great to see.

- Well, we ended up doing a study at the University of Utah with two PhD students, PhD candidates, and we did it for four populations Cerebral Palsy, Deaf, Simple they called it. Those are people, able-bodied people that just have a lisp or something of that nature. And then one other population I can't, I think it was just, Cognitive. Yeah, Mental Retardation it was called back then. And we did that exact game and we put it into a study format and we actually got it published. And for two of the four populations the game actually did improve and increase their voicing.

- Oh, fantastic. That was all before 2010.

- Oh, long before 2010. That would have been 1984 and 85.

- So, how is the Assistive Technology changed since 2010?

- Well in 1986, I would have to say that was my idea of the official beginning of what you and I call Assistive Technology. A woman, a mom of a special needs child came up with the term Assistive Technology it was Adaptive Technology up until then. But she and some colleagues decided Assistive Technology seemed to fit better. And so our field was almost called Adaptive Technology if it wasn't for Jacquelyn Brand, that's her name. And it became Assistive Technology. Over the years, the methodologies really haven't changed how we use the computers for therapy. Really hasn't changed that much. We have a few ground-breakers in the late 80s that sort of set the pattern for everybody else. The computers themselves have gotten faster but anybody who is on the internet can tell you how long they have to wait for any page to load. You watch TV and it makes it sound instant and, it just takes forever for things to happen on the net with so many companies fishing for, your data. I guess they call it mining for your data and hackers fishing data. It's just amazing how slow computers have stayed even with the great advances in the technology where they should be lightning quick, but they're not. But the ways that people use computers hasn't changed. As I say, people are going after the same basic ideas. What has changed is the number of people using them. That's the big difference. The number of people actually using them. If we're looking in the 80s we're looking at maybe 10 to 20,000 people around the globe trying to use computers for people with special needs in different ways. But nowadays it's easily in the millions. But unfortunately, I say unfortunately you can't go to a grocery store. This is the biggest example I say. We had thought back in the late 80s and mid 90s that once this really takes hold that it would be a slam dunk for the rest of the world to jump on board. But in your daily life you don't really see anyone using this technology. If you go to a grocery store you don't see somebody using a communication device, ever.

- No.

- If you go into school you see very small pockets of people using computers, for special needs for very different ways of doing things that other people are doing things. So it hasn't made in 40 years, technology has not made the jump from what I would call the 'laboratory' which would be the school classroom or the speech pathologist's little room where she does her speech therapy. It hasn't really made the jump out to reality where we're seeing it on TV a lot, we're seeing ads on TV for special needs. We had a few TV programs that tried to take a swipe at Assistive Technology, but for the most part it hasn't been as successful in reaching the general population being used on a daily level as we would have hoped back in the early days.

- So RJ, what can people do now to learn more about Assistive Technology in general?

- Well, in April of 2010 a non-special needs related person and company came up with a great miracle device called the iPad. This happened in April of 2010 when Steve Jobs of Apple Computer released the iPad. That was the single biggest difference between-

- Oh.

- The thousands of people using technology which would be the PC and the Mac to millions of people using technology for special needs using the iPad. It really brought technology, to a, in your home in the grocery store, literally. I can go to a grocery store and there's a good chance that there's gonna be a two or three-year-old in a shopping cart, and mom has given them their own iPad to keep them occupied while they're doing the shopping. So as far as the penetration of technology including into special needs the iPad really was the game changer that needed to happen. And so now people have the technology that... They have a movie theater in a box, they've got a movie studio in a box, they've got, a school in a box. The iPad has everything in one little small container and it really has pushed people forward in how easy it is to access the technology that we invented back in the late 80s and mid 90s. It hasn't changed what we're doing with the iPad though it just changes once again, the number of people using it and how easily they're using it how convenient it is to set up. I mean, if you have a special needs child and you wanted to have a computer therapy session for them it requires some setup, a quietness, a lack of wires being in the way and with the iPad we've gotten rid of all that so it's super convenient. You'll put your backpack out, you whip out the iPad and baby you're off to the races. So, the iPad was really the game changer in getting the the computer out there for lay people to apply special technology with.

- That's awesome. As an expert on AT, you've taken it to the next level and said, let's organize some of this stuff and make this a little more available for people and created a website, which is how we found you and with a lot of different products on it. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about your website? Maybe what your website is and-

- Sure.

- What's on there like your most popular item maybe?

- 1994 was when I introduced the idea of making Special Ed technology, Assistive Technology a little more mainstream by having a website. Just like other people were starting to do back in the early 90s. So I hand cobbled together a website and put my products on there. These products all came from moms and teachers similar to Adam's that I just told you about. My ideas come from people that say, they call me or they email me these days and they say, "I have a son that... "I have a student that..." And then they give me sort of a wishlist of what they wish technology could do and then I either try to create it or locate it. These days like there are other companies doing this and I can locate things for them rather than having to recreate things from scratch. And over the years websites for everybody it used to be a very sexy, flashy thing to say that I have a website. That used to be a very unique and cool thing to say these days, everybody has a website. Anybody could have a website. Mine is dedicated towards Special Needs technology. There's about five companies like mine some larger, some the same size as me but there's only around five companies in existence today around the world that specialize only in Special Needs technology. I'm thankful that I'm one of those and I'm still kicking. I'm 68 and I'm still doing it. These days I don't put the website together myself I use what's called a platform which is like a portal, a way into the internet but it also provides some infrastructure and you just put in your products into these pages that are already created, and then you could customize the look and feel of the pages. I use a platform called Shopify which has become the number one platform for putting easy websites on the web, shopify.com. And I get about, I'd say about three to 400 visitors each day, come to my website to look around. In my small field of technology, sales are very limited. There's not a lot of money in Special Needs technology although some people think, "Oh, the government "takes care of them." No, it's a struggle for every mom to get funding in different ways. And it's a struggle for small companies like-

- You were just talking about the web and how things can be slow sometimes.

- It's true, yeah. Dropouts still are there, and every once in a while you see that old, nagging, buffering-

- Yeah.

- Sign come up. It doesn't happen that often but when it does it reminds me of the early days when everything was buffered. Anyway, my website is www.RJCooper.com. It's been there for since 1994 I hope it stays for a longer time. And I put my inventions up there. I always tell a small story about every product. I tell a short story about how it came into existence and why it's the way it is and people... I always get thank you's, I get an email a day from somebody expressing some type of appreciation that I'm doing, what I'm doing. Once again, we men especially we love those pats on the back.

- Yeah we do. And you were saying that, these things aren't covered by the government. So, people are pretty much on their own to pay for 'em-

- Out of pocket, yeah. The term is out of pocket. And there are some companies that cater towards the higher end Assistive Tech products ones that costs upwards of five literally upwards of $10,000. There are some communication devices that are in the $13,000 range and they've really milked public resources they've got it down to a fine art. So they'll help the people locate funding so the people don't have to pay for it themselves. But it requires a lot of effort, it requires time it requires some knowledge. I go for the a hundred to $200 range that's my little pocket. And that doesn't hurt people too badly. I can make a small profit on it, I can keep going. And I'm using materials that if they get lost or destroyed or damaged, at that price point you can replace things. When you're getting a $13,000 item and it breaks, that hurts.

- What do you think are the most important Assistive Technologies?

- Well, the first one would be what we call AAC that stands for Augmentative and Alternative Communication. And that's using these days an iPad as someone's voice that won't talk or can't talk. That's easily the number one use of technology in the world. Very portable, very programmable, very customizable and in use, it's something that parents can understand, they can program it, they can record other people's voices to use as their child's voices. They can use the synthetic voices that exist which sound great these days. So AAC really is the number one usage of technology for special needs. That's very important. Number two, has been around since the early 80s also and those would be screen readers for blind people or people with low vision magnification. So this is happening, the computers speak instead of having to see things on the screen. I'm sure you guys know about screen readers. And, the blind population is numerous very vocal, very tech, very hands-on. Most people that are blind are taught to type from very early ages. And, it's a technology that has been very much the same over the years. Once it really did a good job like a program such as JAWS, a screen reader a program that reads the the PC screen. What's mostly changed about screen readers over time it's not so much how they work, but how they sound. There you go, I see you again. The voices have gotten much better so that, these days it's getting more and more difficult to tell a computer voice from a human voice. Those two areas I think were the, two most important contributions that technology made with special needs as far as just sheer numbers.

- Okay. Caregivers, parents, professionals, have you had any experiences where they, underestimate you or overestimate you or the technology?

- Many times. I have chosen my little sub area of Assistive Technology in what we call Severe Profound. So these are the most challenged people on the planet. Many of these people don't even they're not aware that they exist. They're not what we would call sentient humans. They're breathing, they're walking around but they're not functional. They're also not even aware that, you and I exist. You know, we provide food for them. And these people, Severe Profound are the ones that I've really chosen to be, my bailiwick, my pocket. Many times the parent, especially the father will say, "Oh, he can't do that." And then I'll demonstrate something that he actually can do that I've tailored to make it so that this person in their limited way can be successful at something and progress. And I'll have to convince the father, at least let me try. So for example, for 20 years I did what I call my road trip. Where I would go out across the country to a different geographical area to where I was invited by teachers or special needs professionals and I would fly out on my own dime. I would rent a car, I'd bring all my Assistive Technology and I would drive from Albany airport to Poughkeepsie. And then I would do a workshop there that they set up and they would invite about 100 people. And I would work with eight of their learners or students or people, throughout the day half an hour per, trying to respond to the question by the parent or the teacher, "What is it "that you'd like Marjorie to do that she's not doing now?" That was my primary question. And many times there was a father there not many, but every once in a while, there was a father and when I would ask him that question, "He can't do anything." And I'd say, "Well there's always something. "I can usually, I've been doing this a long time, sir. "I can usually find something that it makes sense "that's academic and that approaches "some type of a learning curve, just let me try." And there's many times in front of 100 people the father just doesn't even wanna try. So I would have to convince them to at least, let me try. Fortunately, as you guys well know with your beautiful show there you do something long enough, you tend to get good at it. So, I was able to, pull a rabbit out of a hat many times and get a person that seemingly would not be able to do anything in the world to respond to music in a certain way, to respond to me dancing with them in a certain way to responding, to even spinning. I worked with many kids with autism and the goal was just to get them to copy me. Which most people take for granted that copying is just intuitive and inherent. Not so with people with autism, they don't copy easily. And so I would just put my arms out and start spinning and try to get them to copy me. And through the technology I was able to have them successful even at that simple thing and it was the beginning of something. And I always say you guys something is always better than nothing.

- Yeah.

- Oh, absolutely. Well, RJ you know we're living in a different world now than we were even the beginning of last year. We've got this thing called COVID. Has that affected AT at all?

- Very much so, yeah. Hands-on services, almost disappeared from the planet. So the idea of going in for a technology assessment or trying something, a device, a piece of software all these things had to become virtual. And special needs technology is a very hands-on intensive activity. So when we couldn't get the person with the special need and the parent and the professional together special needs technology, Assistive Technology almost screeched to a halt. Over the years, I would get a parent in a rural area call me, before email became the way to communicate. And she would ask me, "My school doesn't know a thing "about Assistive Technology, how do I start? "Where do I go? "Do I have any local resources?" And I would always say the same thing. Special needs technology success depends on one person. And it could be the mom, it could be the dad, it could be the speech language pathologist. It could actually be Joe the butcher or a used-car salesman. Just one person taking such an interest in this particular person with special needs and learning about the technology and becoming sort of the mentor of other people that are involved in the equation. It always took one person to rise above and become that leader that dragged everybody else along, sometimes kicking and screaming. No different these days, even more so it takes a very special, usually professional or mom, that says, "I'm not gonna let COVID stop me. "We're gonna have to take it one step at a time "but we're doing it virtually. "It's gonna take 10 times longer doing it virtually "however, we're not gonna stop." And every once in a while that person contacts me and once again, I'm grateful that they're grateful for me being here and holding their hand while they're doing this leadership role.

- And something is always better than nothing.

- So true.

- And so what if COVID decreases over time here will we go back to the way things were or do you think we'll be doing assessments over zoom?

- I think we'll go right back to the way we were because there's no alternative. Virtual application of Assistive Technology is so hands-on intensive, doing it virtually takes so much longer, it's so inconvenient. Getting, even today I was late for today's meeting. And that's just one small example of what happens with technology and these zoom meetings. Picture if you had a special needs child that had some type of emergency or a need how that would slow things up and everybody else would have to wait for them. I think it'll go right back to reality hands-on things as soon as, the vaccine takes effect. President Biden's mask policy, we see fruition from that. More people believe the facts rather than just conjecture by people. I think we'll see about a year from now I think we'll be back to full hands-on Assistive Technology.

- RJ you're obviously very passionate about this subject. And we just do appreciate you being on the show. How can people get in touch with you? We've got your, course we'll put your information on our summary page for our show but, you might as well give it to 'em again.

- Well, there's www.RJ cooper.com and it's not, it's R-J-C-O-O-P-E-R.com. Some people spell it C-O-P-P-E-R.com and I always look at them in the eye and I go, "No, that's copper, not Cooper." And then my email is my name RJ@RJCooper.com my 800 number which I answer all the time, day or night 1-800-RJCooper. So those are three ways that people can contact me and I'm very available, I love to chat. My experience is lengthy and varied so I love to give new ideas to people. And some people call me for very specific answers. Other people call me for very general answers and are happy when I take the time to educate them about Assistive Technology. A mom, like I say in rural Idaho just called yesterday and she doesn't have any local resources whatsoever even in this day and age. And she was crying on the phone, she was so appreciative that somebody understood what was going on with her and could provide some help.

- That's awesome. Well, RJ thanks so much for being on "The Gene and Dave Show". And, next time you're down here in Austin, Texas Gene and I will be sure to take you out for some barbecue.

- I love that idea. Thanks guys for doing what you do.

- Thank you, take care.

- Okay, bye now.

- Bye.

- Bye, bye.

- Alright, well, so long folks we'll see you in the next "Gene and Dave Show".

- [Dave] Bye now.

- Adios.

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