Category: social impact

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

Possibility Neurotechnologies creates brain-computer interface solutions.

Our product, Think2Switch, offers a unique, user-friendly way for those with physical limitations, particularly children, to control devices purely by thought. It’s portable, affordable, noninvasive, and bridges a significant gap in the assistive technology market, promising vast growth potential.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of Possibility Neurotechnologies?

We’ve employed a user-centered design approach, involving end-users throughout development.

Feedback sessions, usability testing, and pilot programs have been instrumental in refining Think2Switch. This ongoing dialogue ensures our technology meets the real-world needs of those we aim to empower.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

Prior to our official launch, Think2Switch has been home-tested, resulting in profound success stories. One user insightfully reminded us, “Never underestimate these kids…When we give them a way to show what they know—it’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The possibilities are endless.” Their words reaffirm our mission, and highlight the transformative impact of our product.

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

At Hominid X, we build wearable tools that help people to reclaim the use of their hands.

There are an estimated 200 million people worldwide who can’t move their hands to pick up and hold objects, so tasks like eating, personal hygiene, or holding a phone become difficult or even impossible.

A better solution was needed, so we designed “Fiber”, a wearable grasping tool that competes with robotic solutions at an affordable price point.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of Hominid X?

Our design process is user-centric to ensure that our products solve the right problems.

Our expertise in manufacturing allows us to quickly try out new product ideas and get them into the hands of our testers.

We keep in touch with them and empower them to speak plainly about their product experience. These friends are critical to our design process – they are motivated problem solvers who often find ways to adapt and manage on their own.

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

Aurie is a medical device start-up that is developing a reusable no-touch intermittent catheter system for people living with neurogenic bladder or urinary retention.

Our products help to increase access to safer no-touch catheters and reduce catheter-associated urinary tract infections, which are a leading cause of death for intermittent catheter users today.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of Aurie?

Yes! We have interviewed over 120 individual catheter users about how they use products today, and have held human factors studies to get feedback on prototypes from close to 60 catheter users.

We’re continuing to pursue user research as a means to get user feedback on our product and go-to-market strategy.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

We haven’t launched yet – the road to getting a medical device FDA approved is a long one.

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

Indii is on a mission to enable greater independence for people with disabilities.

We’re initially focusing on helping the more than 17 million people worldwide with Cerebral Palsy (CP) and others who have limited mobility and fine motor control.

We’ve developed an adaptive switch, called Sofii, built on the latest smart home standards, designed to open up the many benefits of using this technology to new users.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of indii?

Building solutions with and alongside our community is deeply embedded in the way we work. But it’s not always been that way.

The initial inspiration for the work we’re doing was seeing the needs of my youngest sister, Sophie. Sophie has CP and had formed the basis of much of the design work we did, but I hadn’t gone out to speak to other users.

Once we started talking to our users that’s when the project really began to take shape. It is out of these conversations that many of the most innovative features grew.

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

MEMORehab is an online platform that provides allied health professionals (neuropsychologists, occupational therapists, psychologists, speech pathologists) with tools to deliver intervention programs to neurological patients online.

Our platform supports both patients and clinicians through the rehabilitation journey through a mix of telehealth to connect patients and clinicians (either in a group or individually as part of the intervention program) each week, patient management tools for clinicians to organise patients, data analytics for clinicians to review patient progress, computerized exercises for patients to practice skills they learn in the intervention, educational content so patients can learn about their condition and how to manage it, and inbuilt reminders to help patients attend to tasks.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of MEMORehab?

We began our journey by conducting a user experience study interviewing clinicians who had run intervention programs for patients suffering from memory related issues as a result of neurological injury.

From this study, we designed a platform for clinicians to deliver rehabilitation and continued conducting research with clinicians to further develop the platform and understand what tools they needed to run these sorts of interventions in a digital format.

Since then we have engaged both clinicians and patients in user studies and academic research to understand the impact and value of our product. We aim to continue working collaboratively with clinicians and patients to improve our platform.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

Since launching in February, we have onboarded multiple major hospitals and health districts across the country, in addition to conducting research with major universities and hospitals.

Since our launch, we have had multiple groups of patients use our platform successfully and really enjoy their experience. We are told that patients really engage with the program and really look forward to using MEMORehab each week and meeting with their group using our teleconferencing system, in addition to completing exercises and watching educational content.

Clinicians have told us they really enjoy the system and find it streamlined and easy to use.

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

The Care Co is an in-classroom software that teaches students aged 5-12 mental health lessons in school.

Inspired by self-paced teaching tools in the Reading, Writing, and Maths spaces, The Care Co designed a unique evidence-based, ability-based way to teach fundamental coping skills and scale psychology best practice in a learner-friendly way.

Our first targets include the 42 million students aged 5-12 in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States and the United Kingdom – with a comfortable lead pipeline of approximately 379,000 students well before our Australian go-live date, we’re off to a good start towards achieving our goal!

Priced as a per enrolled student per month SAAS subscription model, 1 million students would see us growing on $60.5 million in ARR.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of The Care Co?

We had a number of stakeholders that needed to be included in the design and development of our software–including young people. Several of these key roles including school leadership team members (the economic buyer or customer), in-classroom educators (the gatekeeper), and parents and guardians who are a great ally of ours in the kids mental health space.

While students are the ultimate end user of our product, our GTM, marketing, acquisition, and retention strategies (alongside development!) had to consider the opportunities, challenges, and gaps for each of these roles.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

We’re finishing Beta Testing across the Australian Winter 2023 season (Terms 2 and 3 in Australian schools).

Now partnering with the CPA to give some schools a free trial period as part of their STEP-tember physical health and wellness program participation, the rest of the Australian primary education community will be able to start procuring licences (and using!) The Care Co from October 2023.

We’re super excited to cross the major milestones of both free participants and going live – because the pre-emptive response and interest from the community has been both great and warming!

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

Enabled Play is a platform that gives users the ability to augment and control their technology in ways that work best for them using voice controls, face expressions, body gestures, virtual buttons, and more.

For businesses, we provide the ability to create new levels of equitable access to their platforms and services while also being able to spotlight their services to our users as a new accessible place to be whether it be a game, a bank, a streaming platform, or productivity tool.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of ENABLED PLAY?

Our platform is built for people with disabilities and as well as with them.

From the beginning of our R&D to each feature implementation, we involve our community of users, testers, and supporters to provide as much feedback and review before we even get to the design stage. We have a group of about 2000 people of varying ages and abilities who participate in that constant feedback loop.

We even talk with a number of our users about our naming conventions and brand naming.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

We’ve built an amazing team of icons in this industry that share in our vision of equitable access for everyone. We’ve also introduced thousands of users to our platform who love and use Enabled Play every day.

The 450 characters can’t do the number of quotes and amazing feedback we’ve received justice, but here’s one that is close to encapsulating it from Aaron Price at AbleGamers:

“The current adaptive gaming scene is in a messy hodgepodge of tech. Everyone’s disability requires a unique solution. If a person with disabilities wants to maximize their gaming potential, their controls often necessitates a mixture of assistive technology pulled from many different avenues that don’t logically correlate when people think about videogames. For individuals with disabilities, this makes the process of gaming very confusing, extremely expensive, and time-consuming.

Enabled Play controls have taken huge strides to combine that patchwork of assistive tech that allows disabled gamers to control their videogames into one device all while including an easy-to-understand interface.​”

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

XR Navigation is building Audiom: The world’s most inclusive digital visual, auditory, and tactile map viewer and editor.

Our initial customer segment are businesses, governments, universities, and colleges who care about inclusion.

Next, we will focus on businesses, governments, universities, and colleges who are required to be accessible.

Eventually, we hope to partner with existing mapping tools like Google Maps, ESRI, Apple Maps, the different Microsoft mapping tools, and Mapbox to make their maps inclusive so all maps on the web can be accessible to the greatest number of people.

There are around 24 customer segments in this $22 billion industry that is growing at a 22% CAGR, and each segment has its own unique needs and purchasing process. University and colleges, who we are focusing on now, are a $105 million market segment.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of XR Navigation?

We are employing all blind developers to build the non-visual experience, and sighted map accessibility experts to build the visual experience.

We have run co-designs with around 30 blind participants, and evaluated the system on another 20 blind participants. Here are the papers we have published already, and there are 2 pending publication:

• Paper: Biggs, B., Toth, C., Stockman, T., Coughlan, J., & Walker, B. (2022). Evaluation of a Non-Visual Auditory Choropleth and Travel Map Viewer. Published in the International Conference on Auditory Display, 2022. PMCID: PMC10010675.

• Paper: Biggs, B., Coughlan, J., Coppin, P. (2019). Design And Evaluation Of An Audio Game-Inspired Auditory Map Interface. Published in the International Conference on Auditory Display, 2019.

• Master’s Thesis: Biggs, B. (2019). Designing Accessible Nonvisual Maps. Ontario College of Art and Design University.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

• We have 3 customers.
• We received a Small business technology transfer grant (STTR) from the National Institutes of Health.
• We won 1st place in the Klaus startup competition in March 2023
• We installed an interactive 3D model map and digital audio map of the Magical Bridge Playground.

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

Virtetic is creating game-based virtual reality interventions for people living with limb loss.

Our VR interventions are aimed at helping people start their rehabilitation and prosthesis use training as soon as they recover from surgery.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of Virtetic?

We’ve taken a co-design approach from the start. From the problem-solution validation stage to play testing each iteration of our VR interventions. We engage with prosthesis users and clinicians to understand their needs and wants. What is important to them? What are their goals? How can VR support their goals. Through this approach, we make sure that whatever we create has a purpose and supports our users.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

We are yet to launch our first product, but every engagement we have with someone new is encouraging. People meet our VR experiences with excitement and always are generous with their feedback.

One big this is that we’ve been collaborating with the #1 prosthesis manufacturer, Ottobock, for a few years now. It’s amazing to have their support and advice along the way.

WHAT IS YOUR STARTUP AND WHO IS THE TARGET MARKET?

At Springrose, we design adaptive intimate apparel that improves quality of life for the 200M+ women worldwide who have limited mobility. Our products help women get dressed quickly, painlessly, and independently, thereby restoring dignity and agency every day. The adaptive apparel market is expected to reach $400B globally by 2026.

How have you engaged end-users in the development of Springrose?

Our product was co-developed with 500+ women and 35+ clinicians across the discovery, development, and testing process. They’ve been involved every step of the way and every product detail comes from either a user or a clinician partner.

Can you share some success stories or accomplishments that you’ve achieved since launching?

Some customer success stories include women who have chronic pain or only one mobile arm being able to get dressed independently or experiencing less pain while getting dressed or undressed.