CU Denver Faculty Develop New App to Help People with Intellectual Disabilities Navigate Indoor Spaces

Inspiration comes at unique moments—just ask CU Denver Civil Engineering Professor Caroline Clevenger, PhD.  

During a sabbatical in 2023, Clevenger noticed colleagues at the Center for Inclusive Design Engineering (CIDE) were talking about the challenges people with intellectual and developmental disabilities face while navigating the insides of buildings. Most, they found, rely on caregivers to help them find a doctor’s office suite or shop in stores. “I remember thinking, there are probably ways we can work together to help them be more independent,” Clevenger said. 

Within months, Clevenger recruited her CU Denver colleague, Assistant Professor Bing Han, PhD, who specializes in using augmented and virtual reality in building environments. Together, they created the PinPoint app to help users easily navigate indoor spaces. The app uses augmented reality (AR) on a phone or tablet to overlay visual cues on the surrounding environment. The AR generates an arrow that shows direction and distance to guide individuals using the app toward defined target destinations inside a building. 

With grant support from the Coleman Foundation and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, they are working with CIDE partners, Assistant Research Professor Morris Huang, PhD, and Associate Professor Kendall Hunter, PhD, to conduct local pilot studies. So far, individuals with disabilities have tested the PinPoint technology in supermarkets and lobby spaces. The app helped them navigate open floor plans and even locate grocery items with more ease and self-sufficiency.   

The team has since made significant progress. “We are now testing and exploring the commercialization opportunities,” Clevenger said. She is leading the team’s efforts to transfer the technology developed in the lab to the marketplace, where it can benefit individuals. It’s a process that Clevenger knows well from her career experience. “I worked in industry, and I’ve been an academic for a while now,” she said. “I am passionate about developing things for the real world. This could potentially help a lot of people, so it was a natural step for us.” 

Tech Transfer 

Getting inventions to market, called tech transfer, is a long process that begins with an innovation. Then, the concept goes through the patent process with the U.S. government, which, depending on the product, could lead to license agreements, commercialization, and, eventually, royalty distribution. Once the product is commercialized, it must be marketed to reach the intended customers who can benefit from it.  

Business plans, tech updates, legal questions, and regulations must be created or navigated throughout each stage. Faculty don’t typically have the expertise, nor the time, to complete what can be a multi-year process. That’s where incubator programs, like CU Denver’s Smart Futures Lab, can help. (PinPoint is a member of this year’s class.) These incubators can pair entrepreneurs with ideas to fill a unique niche or advance technology with support to have the best opportunity for success. “It’s exciting,” Clevenger said. “Smart Futures is helping us because we are unfamiliar with the process. They are helping with the next steps and pressing questions.” 

About the App 

The PinPoint app uses a unique approach to navigating buildings and spaces. While most current indoor wayfinding technologies rely on costly building models or tracking devices, the PinPoint app does not. It uses live data. Users in retail and other public places can directly share data with the app to keep it updated on changes to buildings and other internal obstacles, and the directions automatically update.  

Although initially designed for people with disabilities, the technology could also benefit others, including those for whom English is a second language. For this reason, the app has already garnered the interest of Arapahoe County, which has tested the technology in the county’s Administration Building.  

Han is committed to the PinPoint project because he’s interested in designing inventions that support all users, especially the most vulnerable. That’s one of the reasons he enjoys blending augmented reality and virtual reality into his civil engineering work and why he couldn’t turn Clevenger down when she came knocking on his door. “If what we do is valuable, we want to be able to implement it in the real world,” Han said. “Doing so also provides us feedback that helps us figure out how we can make it better. It gives us information for future research.” 

Meet the Researchers

Clevenger holds multiple degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University. She worked in private industry for more than a decade before returning to academia. She is a professional engineer and registered architect. She joined CU Denver in 2014 and is the director of CU Denver’s Construction Engineering and Management Program. This is not her first entrepreneurial venture. In 2020, she helped another CU Denver faculty member, Associate Professor Moatassem Abdallah, PhD, co-found Commutrics.com, a transportation platform that provides commuters with information to make sustainable choices. 

Han joined CU Denver in 2022 and has several degrees, including a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles and has been a reviewer at the ASCE Construction Research Congress from 2020 to 2024. He is also a frequent guest speaker at events focused on computer applications and augmented reality in engineering.