SBIR Phase II: Digital rehabilitation platform for higher education, mental health, and workforce readiness

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will deliver safe and secure learning, vocational training, and re-entry solutions to America’s 2.2 million incarcerated people and 70 million people with criminal records in order to ensure they have the skills and confidence needed to re-enter the workforce. Ensuring these marginalized and underrepresented populations has access to robust education and rehabilitation opportunities is critical for American public safety, stable communities, and workforce development. Recent studies have concluded that every $1 spent on corrections education programs can yield $4-$5 in savings to the state. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to increase the capability of online/offline application integration platforms which are customized for incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals, including: application integrations, security filtering, aggregated learner record keeping, usage tracking, message-logging, and workforce opportunity matching. The ability to deliver content in offline and online environments offers a technical advance in the learning technology platforms available on the market. Additionally, the platform is tackling the difficult issues of ingesting a wide range of learning data from multiple applications and processing this data to determine student performance and aptitude to align capabilities and interests with workforce opportunities. This allows Nucleos to more easily integrate third-party applications, provide a greater range of e-learning opportunities for incarcerated learners at facilities with a wide variation in security restrictions, and promote better learning outcomes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.