Opening Remarks by 3i HoME Founder & CEO, Paul Linet, June 10, 2026 Symposium, Boston MA.

Good Morning, everyone, and thank you for being here — in person at the Boston Architectural College, remotely by video conference today, or at a time of your choosing through a recording of these proceedings. I’m Paul Linet, founder and president of 3i HoME. 

Today’s program — ‘Connected Living: Housing, Technology, and the Future of Long-Term Services and Supports’ — is the second in a series of sessions co-hosted by 3i HoME and Brandeis’ Heller School examining pressing matters of housing equity, technology, and the public systems that are under intense scrutiny by governments at every level. 

We’ve gathered here in Boston at a genuine inflection point. This year marks twenty years since the world adopted the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In those two decades, the technology that can change a disabled person’s daily life has moved from promise to product — artificial intelligence, robotics, assistive devices, smart-home systems. This was all science fiction when the Convention was signed. Today, it’s part of daily life. 

As we meet here, today, June 10, 2026, countries that are parties to the UN Convention — along with academics and innovators from around the world — are convening in New York to explore one question: how will this new wave of disability technology advance the rights and independence of 1.3 billion people, roughly one in six of us, who live with a disability worldwide. 

We’ve witnessed tremendous strides in restoring mobility and function. These are major achievements, and we applaud the thousands of clinicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs applying their talents to improve the lives of people with disabilities. Today, you will be hearing directly from several experts in the field of engineering and assistive technology. 

But before we begin our panel discussions, we need to address the elephant in the room. Here’s the truth we keep coming back to at 3i HoME: the most advanced assistive technology in the world does not deliver independence if the home it lives in was not built to receive it. Housing is the platform. It’s where all of this innovation either works — or quietly doesn’t. 

3i HoME has received scores of inquiries from people desperate for accessible, affordable housing. People in their twenties with life-changing injuries who, upon discharge from rehabilitation, have nowhere to go but a nursing home; caregivers for aging relatives in rural parts of our state living in an old farmhouse that can’t be retrofitted; parents worried about stable housing for their adult child with a permanent movement disorder. 

That is the gap 3i HoME exists to close. We are building housing that is accessible, affordable, and supportive — intentionally designed so that people with mobility impairments and disabilities can live independently, stay integrated in their communities, and actually benefit from innovation as it arrives. Independent. Integrated. Innovative. For us, those aren’t adjectives on a brochure; they’re the specification we build to. 

Our marquee project, Sturgeon Place, in suburban Portland, Maine, is where this gets real. It’s a 51-unit, fully accessible apartment community 3i HoME is co-developing with Boston-based Preservation of Affordable Housing. It includes plans for a dedicated Mobility and Assistive Technology space — not a showroom, but a working incubator, where entrepreneurs and researchers can develop and test the next generation of tools in the one setting that means so much to so many: the home.

I want to dwell on that for a second, because I think it’s the whole point. Two forces are converging right now: the global conversation on the rights of people with disabilities, playing out this week at the UN, and a boom in assistive technology aimed at a market projected to top $60 billion within the decade. Those forces have to come together under one accessible roof — a home designed to flex with the people who live in it, so people can live with dignity. That’s the mission of 3i HoME, and that’s why we’re so pleased to be partnering again with The BAC and with Brandeis’ Heller School of Social Policy and Management. 

So here’s what I’d ask you to take from this. What we’re building is not a one-off, and it is not only a Maine story. It is a model — and a model that can be replicated. The need is international, national, regional, and local — and it is growing. 

The technology has arrived. The policy attention is front and center. And the people who have been desperate for housing that fits their lives have waited far too long already. The question in front of us is not whether this can work. It’s how quickly can we build it at the scale the need demands. 

That’s the lens I’d ask you to carry into today’s program: not just better buildings, but better lives — and a proven model that’s ready to meet the moment. I’m grateful to be in a room full of the people who can help make it real.