Four new projects have been incorporated into the ONCE Foundation startup accelerator to promote social enterprises, whose products and/or services allow an improvement in the quality of life of People with disabilities.
Specifically, it is the Madrid company Mooevothe Valencians of visualf and the Asturians of i4life. Added to these three are also Asturians from loutkar, which are not yet formally constituted as a company. In this way, and after a third call to search for projects, the Fundación ONCE accelerator reaches 15 startups.
“At Fundación ONCE we have been promoting the acceleration of projects and startups related to disability for years. And what the two previous editions have taught us is that these projects, in addition to collaborating in improving the quality of life of people with disabilities, allow us to generate business models and solutions that bring innovation, talent and improvements to the whole of society. ”, declares Jesus Hernandez, Director of Universal Accessibility and Innovation of Fundación ONCE.
In the case of Mooevo, it is a project whose origin is to respond to a real need of a person who pushes another who is in a wheelchair. A) Yes, they have invented the Mooevo Go, a transport system that improves the mobility of people in wheelchairs and that of their assistants. It consists of a battery-operated platform that attaches to virtually any wheelchair on the market.
For their part, the Asturians of i4life are currently marketing Pauto’s cane, an assistive device which is mounted on a cane and allows the geolocation of the person, the detection of falls, the recording of activity and communication between the cane and the caregiver via SMS.
Its clients are mostly affected by parkinson’s who report 28% increases in their average daily activity since using this technology.
Regarding the Valencians of Visualfy, they currently have three products on the market: Visualfy Mobile, Visualfy Home and Visualfy Places. The first of them is a free application through which deaf people can make their mobile phone notifications accessible. Visualfy Home is a home automation device that constantly listens in the user’s home and learns from their daily sound activity. It is capable of making accessible the different sounds of the family environment of a person who is deaf or hard of hearing. Finally, Visualfy Places is a set of technological solutions for the accessibility of public and private spaces. It recognizes relevant sounds from the environment – such as a fire alarm or a sanitary shift beep – and translates them into visual and sensory alerts on any connected device.
As for the Asturians of loutkar, manufacture robotic devices and their mission is to improve people’s quality of life through the design and development of exomuscular solutions that help to recover functional independence. The most advanced device they have is a prototype of an ankle assistance system that helps their movement and that works with a technology that they have patented and that allows the construction of portable and lightweight devices. As an advantage over current devices, it provides greater mobility to the limb and is estimated (not yet marketed) to have a lower acquisition cost.
