Healthy Cooking Becomes Routine for Residents of Independent Living Program

Surprising Gifts of a Better Meal

Living in affordable housing units at Willakenzie Crossing, residents of SAIL Housing in Eugene, Oregon call over a dozen one-bedroom and studio apartments home-sweet-home. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, SAIL stands for “Supported Access to Independent Living” and operates with a mission of supporting sustainable housing in a life-enriching environment that fosters dignity and independence for adults with developmental disabilities.

As part of the program, residents gather weekly in the community room to socialize and learn new skills. When talking about cooking and eating habits in a group discussion last year, residents collectively admitted they struggled with finding healthy meal options and knowing how to follow a recipe. Continue reading →

Transitions Cost More Than $2.3B in IDD Support Services

Cyclic Regression Causes Expensive Turnover, Painful Restarts, and Critical Struggles.

Decrease staff training costs.
Create smoother transitions for clients.
Preserve your investments in human resources.
Have a sustained impact on client quality of life.

You have a clear and special mission to support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), promote their independence, and to bring meaningful improvements to their lives. You measure success by how well you can increase their abilities and help them solve daily challenges. That’s why your organization exists, and that’s what builds a smile on your face and warms your heart. You take all the steps needed to design a high-quality program with the service payments available to drive the supports you provide. Continue reading →

Free April Webinars for Autism Awareness Month

Over the past year, many of you expressed an interest in learning more about the Cognitopia platform of apps to support self-determination and independence for individuals with autism and other cognitive exceptionalities.

In honor of Autism Awareness Month, we have two free webinars scheduled for April:

Tuesday, April 16: 4pm – 5pm PST
Thursday, April 18: 12pm – 1pm PST

Register here for either of these days and times and we’ll send you an email with event details. If these times don’t work but you’d like to participate at another time, let us know that too because we’ll be holding additional sessions at a later date.

Meet our Founder: Tom Keating

For over 25 years, Tom Keating has worked on developing technology to improve the capabilities of people with cognitive disabilities. This has ultimately led to the development of the Cognitopia Platform for Self-Determination, which fosters greater independence and better support.

Continue reading →

Meet the Artist

Over the last few weeks, we’ve begun to roll out a new look-and-feel for the demo user accounts on our website. Each account persona has a backstory and a network of established relationships that mimic the real-world use case in which they would receive support toward self-determination, transition, and independent living. Continue reading →

2018: A Year in Review

As 2018 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to reflect upon the progress Cognitopia has made this year. We credit much of this momentum and success to you, our many wonderful students, teachers, clients, and organizations using the Cognitopia Platform for Self-Determination on a daily basis to facilitate person-centered planning, goal setting, and self-managed independent living and work. Continue reading →

Cognitopia Evolution: Then and Now

In many ways, Cognitopia got its start when our CEO and founder Tom Keating became the primary caregiver for his brother James who experienced autism. James moved from their parents’ home in New York to live with Tom and their other brother, Francis, in Eugene, Oregon in 1981. Continue reading →

Eugene Tech Company Awarded Almost $700,000 in New Grant Funding to Further Community Participation and Meaningful Employment for Individuals with Cognitive Disabilities

PRESS RELEASE

EUGENE, OR: OCT 25, 2018: Assistech Systems, LLC, a small business focused on research and development of technology to support employment, education, and community living for youth and adults with cognitive disabilities, together with its commercialization partner, Cognitopia, announce two new grant projects that have been funded through the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), which is housed in the Administration on Community Living within the Department of Health and Human Services. The new funding will support the development of digital technology that augments the company’s existing platform of web apps designed for individuals with intellectual disabilities and autism. Continue reading →

National Disability Employment Awareness Month Empowers All

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). Endorsed by the US Department of Labor (DOL), the purpose of NDEAM is to help educate individuals about disability employment issues and to celebrate the many and varied contributions of America’s workers with disabilities.

This premise falls in line with the tools we are developing at Cognitopia. Continue reading →

Announcing the New MyLife

Earlier this week Cognitopia released a major upgrade to the MyLife ePortfolio application for IEP Self-Direction and Person-Centered Planning.

MyLife is being successfully used in elementary, middle, and high schools as well as in college programs and adult customized employment and supported living services across the United States. The new MyLife is more intuitive, customizable and user-friendly, strengthening the focus on self-determination—a core value of the Cognitopia Platform. The new design reflects the incredible feedback and suggestions we’ve received from all of these user groups. Continue reading →

Giving Students Meaningful Data to Measure their Progress

Measuring student progress is essential to understanding areas of student need. For individuals with intellectual barriers or unique learning styles, activities like standardized testing or even quiz scores and letter grades over time can be demeaning and seem pointless. Perhaps more valuable for students’ overall educational experience is being able to understand for themselves how they are doing on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis through meaningful data visualization. Continue reading →

Nate Emerson: Cognitopia Intern Extraordinaire

Nate’s Emerson’s interest in voice acting, theater, and comedy began when he was in high school. Using a WordPress blog to capture his strengths, interests, goals, and preferences, Nate was one of the first individuals to transition his electronic portfolio into the MyLife application. Continue reading →

Empowering Students to Participate in their Own IEP Meetings

Individual education planning (IEP) meetings can often be stressful for everyone involved and not feel particularly good for parents and teachers alike. But IEP meetings can be even more painful for students when they are not included and not prepared for what the meeting will involve.

Like many educators, I am a firm believer in having the student involved and engaged in their own IEP meeting and I often get asked about how to best involve students in the meeting planning process. Continue reading →

Routines App: Creating Custom Categories in Routines

As the name implies, Custom Categories in Routines allows you to group a collection of routines that are specific to, say, an organization, a school, or a community living facility.

The benefit of the Custom Categories feature is that many people can be added to the category during the time it is created. For example, a teacher may create a custom category called Community Living Skills and add all of his currently-enrolled students with an existing Cognitopia account. Continue reading →

Feature Update for ScanDo! App: Add to Print List

One of the original apps available within the Cognitopia platform, ScanDo! hasn’t had many design updates in recent months. And, until now, ScanDo! has primarily been a stand-alone app.

Using a relatively simple interface, ScanDo! is intended to provide on-demand support for task completion via images, video modeling, or text-based documents by browsing a curated library of media that are paired with a unique QR code. When you scan the QR code with the ScanDo! app, you see the document or video that is linked to that code. Continue reading →

Cognitopia Webinar: “Do it, Track it, Show it”

Last month we had our first webinar “Do it, Track it, Show it,” where Tom Keating spent the better part of an hour introducing attendees to the fundamentals of the Cognitopia Platform. He began with a general discussion on how the Cognitopia apps support self-determination, transition, and independent living and then moved into some of the core design features that facilitate both independent and shared/team use. Continue reading →

Innovative Self-Management Apps for Aging in Place

More and more, technology enables our lives in ways that facilitate independence and connectivity and it seems like there’s an app for just about everything. For individuals aging in place, apps can help them stay organized, accomplish daily goals, or remotely link them to their adult children, a team of caregivers, or the support services they need in order to continue to live in their homes and thrive within their communities. Continue reading →

TIPS Project Update: Helping Parents of Children with Traumatic Brain Injury

The Traumatic Brain Injury Positive Strategies project (TIPS) is a collaborative effort among Assistech Systems LLC, the Center on Brain Injury Research and Training (CBIRT) at the University of Oregon, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Continue reading →

Using the New Routines App for Completing Tasks

The Routines app provides a way to show the steps needed to complete a task using text, images, or video. Use Routines when you want to support task accomplishment without needing to track progress data. You can create your own collection of routines or you can browse from a library of routines submitted by other Cognitopia users. And you can share your own routines to that same community library.