The Boston Globe’s weekly Ocean State Innovators column features a Q&A with Rhode Island innovators who are starting new businesses and nonprofits, conducting groundbreaking research, and reshaping the state’s economy. Send tips and suggestions to reporter Alexa Gagosz at alexa.gagosz@globe.com.
Name an issue, and there’s likely dozens of apps that claim to help solve it. Yet while the tech industry is small in Rhode Island, there is a cohort of young entrepreneurs who are finding new ways to innovate. Here are a few to watch going into 2024.
R3: a new app that helps people with IDD report abuse
A team at the University of Rhode Island has developed a new, free app that helps teach adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities how to recognize abuse and report it. R3: Recognize, Report and Respond teaches people with IDD about various forms of abuse by breaking down the various forms of abuse, how they can transpire, what you should do when you encounter abuse or see other people affected by it, the so-called symptoms of abuse, and with a direct line of contact for every state on how to report abuse to the authorities. Read more about their technology here.
Sift: a new way to find secondhand clothes online
Many Americans who want to purchase secondhand clothes are finding themselves at a crossroads: shopping online can be time-intensive, inconvenient, and frustrating. Secondhand products are spread across dozens of platforms — like eBay, Depop, Poshmark, and TheRealReal — and the typical text-based search does not work as well since most resellers label products inconsistently or mistakenly. Three Brown University students have founded Sift, a free browser extension that helps find secondhand alternatives to clothes that consumers are interested in purchasing online. Read more about their technology here.
Restaurent: the ‘Open Table’ of private events
Booking a private event typically means consumers have to call a list of restaurants and hope the right person would be available to speak to go over pricing and other details. But most of the time, that’s not the case. In July, local entrepreneur Nick Cianfaglione founded Restaurent, a new tech startup that he said eases the event planning process. “I like to describe Restaurent as the Airbnb or Open Table for private events,” Cianfaglione said. “Someone is able to easily go to our platform and say how many people they are hosting, a specific date, their budget and then show which venues are available for rent.” Read more about their technology here.
Student Ally: an app to help reduce sexual assaults on college campuses
Approximately one in every three women and one in six men are sexually assaulted at some point during the four years they attend college. Alex Romano left his job as a lawyer to devote himself to reducing those stats. Since 2016, Romano has been working to develop and launch Student Ally, a new app that he said can reduce the number of sexual assaults on college campuses while also helping report assaults. It’s a technical platform that combines an application for students, but with a variety of back-end systems for university employees to help in the event a student is assaulted. Read more about their technology here.
SOMA: an app that wants to understand your pain
A new mobile app developed by researchers at Brown University’s brain science institute is looking to find what happens in the brain during the transition from acute to chronic pain. The app, SOMA, is designed to directly support individuals with chronic pain and it gathers data that could help researchers predict how someone’s pain becomes chronic. Read about their technology here.
Alexa Gagosz can be reached at alexa.gagosz@globe.com. Follow her @alexagagosz and on Instagram @AlexaGagosz.
