I’d like to sincerely thank the following people for contributing to this effort:

At the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS), I had ongoing guidance from my Liberal and Integrative Studies (LNT) faculty committee on my design and approach of this work. My LNT Committee members – Dr. Cecilia Cornell, Dr. Eric Hadley-Ives, Dr. William Kline, and Dr. Kathy Petitte-Jamison – were a thoughtful source of advice and encouragement.

I want to thank Mr. Darwin Vaught for his original, unsolicited email to my mother in which he described the remarkable before-and-after experiences of people with developmental disabilities using smartphones. His observations provided the springboard for me to explore this subject.

I’d also like to thank the people with developmental disabilities who chose to participate in this project. Their comments provided many, many examples of how these technologies improve their autonomy. My thanks also to those families and friends of participants that helped connect us in the first place.

Benjamin Snow

August 1, 2014