8 groups develop innovations for differently abled and get to exhibit them on a Red Cross platform

Since 1979, people in more than 48 countries have benefited from physical rehabilitation services, such as physiotherapy, the provision of over 1.4 million assistive devices, their repair and maintenance and social inclusion activities.

In India, the disabled population constitutes 2.21% of the total population, according to the 2011 Population Census, which is approximately 26.5 million people in the country.

However, with this high disability population there is still a lot needed to make places more disabled-friendly. Keeping this in mind, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) organized an ‘Enable Makeathon’ where several groups were given chance to design an innovation to aid persons with disabilities. Seven winners were shortlisted and these people were given the opportunity to build and scale their innovations.

The Enable Makeathon is a programme initiated by the ICRC and its partners, including the Global Disability Innovation (GDI) Hub, to develop prototypes and affordable solutions for challenges faced by PWDs, particularly those living in rural areas. Teams comprising engineers, scientists, designers, innovators, PWDs, humanitarians, manufacturers, investors and entrepreneurs compete against each other for grants that will allow them to further develop and market their innovations. Each of the contesting teams are developing an innovation that directly responds to one of the 12 Enable Makeathon challenges, including access to education, access to tourism and access to transport.  

Speaking about the Makeathon, Tarun Sarwal, Head of Innovation, ICRC said,“The ICRC has been distributing orthotics and prosthetics to people across 40 countries. However, we believe these challenges can be better addressed by working with those straight out of an environment of physical disability and living in underdeveloped countries without means of inclusion. The finalist teams’ innovations truly highlight how the combination of open-source hardware and the rise of Indian talent in ICTs can infuse new ideas and efforts into the assistive technology movement by actually working with persons with disability.”

Of 16 teams, six teams were shortlisted. These teams included Team Bleetech (Mumbai), Team Autobots (Vellore), Team Welava (Delhi), Team For Growth  (Bangalore), Team Torchit (Ahmedabad), and Team Unicom Solutions (Vellore).

Team Bleetech from Mumbai built a low-cost encyclopedia where users can ask a mobile platform using either sign language orEnglish, and they receive answers in Indian sign language. “Indian Sign Language is not a translation of any spoken language into signs. It is a complete language itself with definite structure and vocabulary of signs. With hand gestures, sign language also requires facial expressions and body language. American Sign Language is one of the most structured and complete sign language,” said a spokesperson for Bleetech, adding that while working with the deaf population in India, we realized that we have very less accessible content for the deaf. Linguistic skills of many of the deaf individuals are less developed as compared to the hearing person of same age. “Being hearing impaired, one cannot hear and learn new words like we do, the vocabulary is also limited. We observed that even if we can find an answer using the internet,” they added.

Meanwhile team Autobots, which comprises four college students from Vellore, developed a pregnancy diagnosis for the visually impaired with molecular imprinted diagnostics for detecting pregnancy for blind people. “One challenge that immediately jumped out at us was that of how visually-disabled women who are blind might often have to depend upon another to detect their own pregnancies, information which is extremely personal to most. While this might appear as a small issue to many, we strongly feel that women with such disabilities should have the right to this information as freely and easily as women without disabilities. We also did our research about the different methods available right now in order to detect HcG levels in urine and therefore wanted to try out new methods to detect it,” they said.