F E A T U R E

F E A T U R E

Technology Partnership Helps Children With Disfluencies

By Carina Storrs • Photos courtesy of Change & Impact, Inc.

Since childhood, former NBA star Michael Kidd-Gilchrist has had difficulty speaking. He has now partnered with the Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center to develop a prototype of a technology platform that he hopes will help millions of children with stuttering.

Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, a former NBA star who played for the Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets and Dallas Mavericks throughout his nine-year NBA career, has had difficulties speaking for as long as he can remember. For years, he was afraid to talk in class and got teased by other children. It wasn’t until middle school that Kidd-Gilchrist was diagnosed with stuttering and not until college that he started getting speech therapy.

Fear of having to speak publicly overshadowed otherwise joyous moments for Kidd-Gilchrist, such as winning the NCAA men’s basketball championship with the University of Kentucky in 2012 and being selected as the second pick in the 2012 NBA draft. But over time, “speech therapy helped me understand myself better and gain a lot of confidence and not care how other people view me,” he says.

In the summer of 2025, Kidd-Gilchrist and his startup, GreenLight Enterprises, Inc., kicked off a partnership with New York Institute of Technology’s Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center (ETIC) to develop a prototype of a technology platform that he hopes will help millions of children with stuttering get help faster than he did. Between 5 and 10 percent of children stutter at some point, and although most outgrow stuttering, it persists into adulthood for approximately 2 percent.

Left: Michael Kidd-Gilchrist played for the Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets during his nine-year NBA career. Right: Michael Kidd-Gilchrist met with students to talk about his nonprofit at Taylor County High School in Campbellsville, Ky.

The technology platform will be a hub for services and resources for anyone who interacts with kids who stutter, including families, teachers, guidance counselors, and pediatricians, unlike existing resources that tend to target only certain stakeholders.

Kidd-Gilchrist realized the great need for this technology after embarking on an advocacy tour with Change & Impact, a nonprofit he founded after retiring from the NBA, which works to increase awareness and improve resources for people who stutter. He and others at Change & Impact met with hundreds of individuals from stuttering support groups, pediatric groups, speech therapy clinics, and children’s hospitals.

The tour had one major takeaway for Kidd-Gilchrist: “There is a large gap in the healthcare and education systems in understanding stuttering and people who stutter,” he says. In particular, he realized that pediatricians often don’t have the time or training to assess children for stuttering and identify who should be referred to a speech-language pathologist for diagnostic workup, instead reassuring families that their child will eventually grow out of it.

One of the most innovative components of the technology is the artificial intelligence (AI) model focused on early detection. Austin Stietzel (B.S. ’23, M.S. ’24), visiting assistant professor of computer science, is developing the model under the leadership of Michael Nizich, Ph.D., director of the ETIC. The ultimate goal, after the prototype is completed and tested and the technology is commercialized, is for the platform to be a key resource for all stakeholders involved in the journey of an individual who stutters, regardless of where they are in their journey.

The Path to Partnership

New York Tech’s ETIC leaders first met with Change & Impact’s leaders in a setting that had little to do with communication disorders but showcased the ETIC’s core strength: partnering with companies to build the first functional prototype of their patented ideas.

In December 2024, NASA, which has partnered with the ETIC since 2021, held a technology transfer summit (T2X) where ETIC student employees presented prototypes of various NASA-patented assistive technologies, such as a device that measures an individual’s oxygen and carbon dioxide level and may one day perform remote health monitoring. Change & Impact learned about the summit from STEMComm Ventures, a commercialization company that hosted the event. Watching the presentations, they were immediately intrigued by how the ETIC might be able to advance their technology concept.

“ETIC’s strength lies in bringing together interdisciplinary faculty, students, and industry partners in a well-equipped environment that enables efficient, hands-on prototype development. This allows patented or novel ideas to move swiftly from concept to functional prototypes,” says Babak D. Beheshti, Ph.D., dean of the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences.

Another standout feature is that the ETIC runs much like a business. Whereas university innovation centers generally rely on grants, New York Tech has contracts with partners that support its work and lay out specific timelines for deliverables and payment based on meeting those goals, Nizich explains. “The structure of what we have here is unlike anything that exists at other universities,” he says.

Pictured from left: Angelina Do, Michael Nizich, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Babak D. Beheshti, and Austin Stietzel

Before signing a new contract, the ETIC dedicates a lot of time talking with potential partners about the details to assess the project’s feasibility and ensure that the ETIC is prepared to take it on. This type of consulting protects students from working on an impossible project and gives both students and startups a great opportunity to think through all aspects of a project, Nizich says. For the stuttering technology platform, he had about eight meetings with GreenLight Enterprises, which Change & Impact also attended, before the parties entered into a contract.

“We came into these meetings with a strategy and a plan. What we needed was how to define those two components in the tech space to achieve our goals,” says Kristen Peifer, chief operating officer of Change & Impact. “We appreciated Dr. Nizich and the ETIC team really listening to and understanding our vision and telling us what was and was not possible, what it would involve, and also giving us ideas about the potential for this technology that we hadn’t thought about,” Peifer says.

Kidd-Gilchrist’s nonprofit, Change & Impact, has a strong focus on education, with its college scholarship program for students who stutter and continuing education programs for clinical and school-based speech-language pathologists. “We love having New York Tech students be part of this work,” Peifer notes.

Many Parts to Make the Whole

Once Nizich and his team solidified the plan for GreenLight Enterprises’ technology prototype and the contract was signed, they set off orchestrating a symphony of development, working on many components of the platform simultaneously. For the AI model, Stietzel and Nizich started meeting with international thought leader and board-certified speech-language pathologist in stuttering, Joseph Donaher, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, who is a Change & Impact advisor and helped create the concept for the technology platform.

With Donaher’s input, Stietzel is developing an AI model focused on early intervention. As an ETIC student employee, Stietzel developed AI models for NASA, such as a model to predict a battery’s lifespan, but this AI model, he notes, is special because it uses input from people and has direct health applications.

In parallel, Nizich is leading work on designing the web portal, where users can create an account, complete questionnaires about the child and family, and upload other key data points. He is also creating an SQL database connected to the web portal that stores user information. Meanwhile, Angelina Do, a junior majoring in computer science, is developing the framework for the iPhone and Android apps. After the recent completion of the alpha version of the web portal by Nizich, Do is now completing the first versions of both the Android and iPhone apps that will be used by mobile portal users.

“When I graduate and try to enter the workforce, I think this experience will be a big advantage in a competitive job market.” – Angelina Do

For Do, the learn-as-you-go, businesslike environment of the ETIC is exactly what she wanted when she was hired as a student employee. “It’s totally different from class,” she says. “It’s fast-paced and everyone is focused on duties and meetings,” including the meeting that Do, Nizich, and Stietzel have every Thursday with GreenLight Enterprises. “When I graduate and try to enter the workforce, I think this experience will be a big advantage in a competitive job market,” Do says.

As soon as the various technology components are complete, the team will merge them and prepare for what Nizich says is the most exciting part: initial testing of the prototype. Later this fall, he expects they will have a version to be assessed by Donaher and a small group of families in a study-like setting. “The amount of information that flows back—to tell us what is working and not working—is very motivating. Students see how real-life users interact with the prototype and get to work out little bugs, like if a button on the app isn’t working,” Nizich says.

From Left: Michael Nizich is leading the ETIC team in the development of the prototype; Angelina Do and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist; Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Austin Stietzel

“Just the Start”

Nizich and his team are designing the technology prototype with upgrades in mind. For the AI model, they’re building an automation process to improve its accuracy. For the hub of resources, GreenLight Enterprises is planning to update it with a long list of offerings, including support group forums for parents and caregivers, continuing education for pediatricians, and training opportunities for teachers and guidance counselors.

Longer term, the data that the technology platform collects will be an incredible resource for researchers, as Nizich discussed with GreenLight Enterprises in one of their early meetings. For example, faculty at New York Tech are already interested in exploring the survey data to answer questions about the genetics of stuttering and how head injury may affect communication disorders.

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to work with New York Tech,” Kidd-Gilchrist says. “This is just the start and something that is going to be big and great. And eventually, we want the technology to help people with any kind of speech disfluency or impediment.”


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