REDX Assistive Tech Heros — Changemakers for the specially abled
The power of innovation templates in catalyzing specialized solutions
Chinmay Kulkarni, was a third-year student at VIT, Pune when he along with his team comprising Juilee Katpatal, Prathamesh Nadkarni and Monica Kawade decided to tackle a massive problem impacting the speech and hearing impaired in his community. This blog captures the story of how the REDX innovation platform conceived by Dr. Ramesh Raskar Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab helped them collectively structure their journey in exploring assistive technologies as social innovators. Chinmay talks about designing a solution to assist the disabled community using REDX Spot process. Can third-year engineering college students design a high impact and targeted solution to a two crore target audience? Let us find out in the following sections:
Chinmay starts his journey as a social innovator
The faculty at VIT, Pune embarked on an exciting journey with their third-year students as they introduced them to REDx bottom up co-innovation model. It has been very effective in targeting massive social entrepreneurial challenges in the past using specific templates for problem and solution mapping.
Why was the REDX Spot process important in Chinmay’s journey as an innovator?
As part of the Spot process in investigating opportunities and finalizing which problem to work on, Chinmay’s team deliberated on smart transportation versus building assistive technologies for hearing and speech impaired. The REDx Spot templates used for grand opportunity recognition guided their instincts to choose a burning issue which could immensely contribute to bridging the communication gap in Assistive technologies. These templates have been considered successful for reversing startup failures by helping fine-tune problem statements and involving stakeholders right at the beginning of the innovation process, diffusing risks of failure early in the process of innovation.
Showcased below is an inspiring and quick Q and A with Chinmay who represented his team from VIT, Pune conducted in April 2019.
Q1: You started a new REDX club in your college VIT, Pune one year ago. How was it in the beginning? What drove you to assistive technologies?
Chinmay: We came to know about REDX from our faculty and were motivated by a facility in our neighborhood which hosts the speech impaired. There were 4 members in our team. Juilee Katpatal, Prathamesh Nadkarni and Monica Kawadeand myself, we were all from third-year engineering. We decided we will come up with an interface to help people who do not know sign language. We had live witnessed the pain points in this problem and hence we could empathize more with this problem versus the challenges associated with smart transportation.
Out of 130 crores plus population in India, 2 crore people are estimated to be disabled; 50 lakh amongst them are hearing and speech impaired disabled. Compared to traffic optimization problems which deal with factors like transportation, time of commute, mitigating accidents, we chose to target the two crore population and improve their experience with assistive tech. The problem that we went after was bridging the communication gap in sign language using a software solution.
As of now, due to the presence of a large number of dialects in India, a one-size-fits-all sign language system used in the US is not adequate for regional language dialect users who are speech impaired, and this is seriously impairing their ability to communicate thoughts and ideas. So also their ability to gain access to opportunities in education and jobs.
Q2: How did you map your grand opportunity in the REDX Spot innovation process?
Chinmay: We did not know about the grand opportunity at that time. However, in the agenda for conducting the Spot process, the first part entailed opportunity investigation. We performed a thorough opportunity mapping as a team exercise.
The exact grand opportunity statement we came up with at the end of this process was: “What if there is an interface which can bridge the gap between the hearing and speech impaired and normal people in the society”
Q3: What were some of the challenges you faced using Spot process in creating your Assistive Technology solution for the hearing and speech impaired?
Did Resource mapping in the Spot process help resolve your priorities?
Chinmay: Getting down in the field and communicating with the speech impaired in sign language, asking questions like what problems they faced was one of the hardest challenges we faced. We went to schools to collect data. The speech and hearing impaired don’t have adequate education and cannot speak or understand the text in context, and this severely limited our possibilities with communication in the form of text.
The most difficult part was to find the correct way to bridge this communication gap. Many problems can be addressed in bridging this communication gap but which one to address.
Some people need prosthetics for physically disabled but finding that one problem to address was the hardest part.
If you study this market carefully, amongst the hearing and speech impaired 50% of disabled population do not have access to good assistive tech for communicating; so after a lot of research and time going in to finding which problem was worth addressing, as a priority, we decided to build a software interface to bridge the communication gap which currently exists in the Assistive Tech scenario.
Resource Mapping phase in the Spot process was very useful in conducting this research. The questions asked in during resource mapping helped us fine tune our problems and mitigate risks of innovation failure.
Q4: How long did it take for you to fine-tune your problem statement after identifying the grand opportunity statement?
Chinmay: We took about 1.5 months to come up with this problem statement
Q5: How did you go about resource mapping to work toward your final problem statement?
Chinmay: Now that we knew that we needed to do something related to the interface- to bridge this communication gap — we decided to meet some direct/indirect stakeholders as directed in the Resource Mapping template in the Spot process. We visited the hospital in Pune. We realized again that the major problem in India is a dialect. In the US and other western countries, there is only one sign language to follow, but in India, there is a huge variation in dialects which from region to region.
Since the disabled are poor, they don’t have money to pay and enable these corrections in the local dialects. During our research, we also discovered that the government and related organizations in this domain are working on an international scale to solve this problem of dialects.
The disabled people are being allotted job opportunities by the government and this was relieving to know.
We visited the manufacturer as part of conducting our stakeholder interviews, they make these hearing speeches impaired devices. None of the devices they were building helped in bridging the communication gap between the speech impaired people and normal people.
We discussed our actionable problem statement of — creating a software interface which can help the disabled communicate with normal people — with doctors and professionals and they readily agreed that this solution is required.
The resource mapping interviews made us realize that we are headed in the right direction in designing our solution.
Q6: How did you map the possible solutions? How did you produce the solution list?
Chinmay: We created an exhaustive list of all the solutions that we could build, and matched it with our skills matrix: asked ourselves what skill set do we possess, and what problems we can tackle with our given skill set.
Q7: How did you come up with solutions?
Chinmay: Once the problem was chosen, using the problem canvas, we considered the suggestion from doctors and patients, we unanimously heard that :
- A software but not a hardware solution was needed.
- What can we accomplish with software as a solution
- The suggested that we solve the problem of education using an app
We decided we will create lots of content which are educational and make it available on the app (especially ages 10–12 articles on STEM to educate them).
We also thought about addressing problems in communication, and how we can specifically bridge the gap in communication. We then came up with an idea about capturing an image of a sign language input, process it on the mobile phone and translate the output into speech (this is a simple and efficient solution).
A lot of peripheral problems can be addressed during this process, for e.g., can the speech impaired make an appointment with a doctor using this solution? The doctor will read the sign language image and respond to their appointment availability. The teachers up until 10th grade in the hearing and speech impaired schools also endorsed this.
Q8: How did you test your solution framework?
Chinmay: We got busy after this and did not complete the prototype. We then created findings plot, inferences, and conclusions, the possible skill set and solutions. We are done with SPOT process.
Q9: Which stage in the project are you at the moment?
Chinmay: We need to analyze sign language (and converted to speech) in order to build the prototype, which we did not complete. We just chose a single dialect to start with, there is a sign for each letter and number from 0–9, and we tried to generate signs and check the result. It was not completely developed.
We were introduced to this document, with a resource map, problem/solution canvas. That is all we have accomplished at this moment. We have not yet gotten feedback from stakeholders on multiple solutions, as we are still working on the solution. So we have not yet started the Probe phase following the Spot process. We are planning on it.
It is important to instil the discipline of a systematic approach to problem-solving among students. They are architects of our future, it is crucial for them to adopt a rationale of need-based innovation versus passion driven innovation. This was the ratio of problems to solutions does not remain imbalanced across the world. Technology can be democratized to billion-dollar problems in emerging markets versus ego based innovations which may turn into innovation failures.
