Growing up, my brother and I had a relationship like any other brothers would. We went to the pool together in the Summer, shared the back seat on family vacations and woke up early on Christmas morning together and snuck into the living room early to grab our stockings. You know, the usual. The only difference is, I’ve never had a full conversation with him.



When Dustin was born, there were complications that rendered him in an incubator for the first weeks of his life. Due to these events, his physical ability was lowered tremendously. A year or so later he was diagnosed with severe Autism which even lowered his ability to function as we do. I looked back at everyday growing up and seeing the struggle my family had with Dustin and having a child that had to be in social classes, couldn’t do normal activities and couldn’t speak and thought if I could help these families, in even the most small way, I would. But I never knew how.

Fast forward 20 years, to my last year of graduate school. I was six months away from moving across the country. With this knowledge I had, I wanted to design a tool that would help my brother to communicate his needs and that would relieve a little stress on my family as a whole. So I did, and we call it Dustin’s Words.

Dustin’s Words is communication device that works using simple iconography and sends text messages to my mom. Text messaging is a simple technology we all take for granted but we can use it in a more powerful and meaningful way given its immediate, inexpensive and long distance capabilities.

While this has helped my family, with the help of a few friends, we have a larger vision for what it can be. The current landscape of AAC devices, while great, most families have a difficult time affording them and they are difficult to obtain. This is where we want to help. Over the last 3 months we are been testing, iterating and building Dustin’s Words out to go from a device built for one, to something that can help thousands for no cost. We’d like to build, customize and gift Dustin’s Words devices to families in need for free, because that’s the least we can do.

Follow us on our journey, as we will be posting frequent updates here on our blog with the breakthroughs in the design, partnerships that arise, touching stories and everything in between.

- Matt Reamer