In the Inỹ language , Auire is a greeting to the newcomers. It is spoken by the Javaés tribe, found in some regions of Brazil. Kanoanã is one of their villages located in the Bananal Island, Tocantins that was visited by AUIRE founders on 2007.

Our history

The first prototype of our product was developed during a course of the engineering graduation. At the end of the semester, the device was presented on an exposition that was attended by NGOs that work with visually impaired. A lot of feedback was received about the utility and usability of the project. They also showed a huge interest in taking it to the market. The orginial team that builds the first prototype had four participants.

After the end of the course, one of the participants wanted to continue working on the project, however, because of some difficulties it remained stagnated during some time. Recently, the project was restarted with a new team which believes that this can not be only an academic project, it must be available to everybody that needs.

The problem

Nature is beautiful, but if you can not see the colors? And if you can not even see?

Recognize a color is not just an aesthetic issue. The visually impaired people, specially the blind ones, cannot recognize colors and money bills. This is important to improve their life quality because it turns them more independent and elevates their self-esteem. In addition, this handicap avoids them to work on several areas. Most of these people have low income and therefore, need a low cost solution to this problem.

There are 314 million people visually impaired in the world, 45 million of them are blind  (WHO, 2009). Also, 87% of them live in developing countries (25 million only in Brazil).

About 29% of the Brazilian visual impaired people (7.25 million) lives with less than $200 per month (the minimum salary in the country). Only São Paulo state holds 2.2 million of them. In addition, the Brazilian’s life expectancy is 68 years, with 80% of this time without any handicap. This mean that the average Brazilian will live 14 year with some kind of handicap (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, 2009).

The solution

A open source and low cost color and money bill identifier portable device.

Our solution is a low cost color and money bill identifier portable device. This device reads the color of an object or the value of a money bill and speaks the name in loud sound. Our identifier software will be open source and the hardware will have its project open.

The needed people are addressing the problem of color recognition relying on someone to help them or buying a market device. There are some identifiers sold in Brazil, with prices varying from $300 (color only) to $600 (money bill only). However it is a high cost to the Brazilian’s visually impaired and there isn’t an integrated device to identify, with one device, colors and money.

We have information from our NGO partners about a need for a product like the AUIRE color and money identifier. Also, we have developed a prototype and made it public on the university’s website. Since then we receive emails from people requesting to buy the device. The prototype was developed during the graduation course. At the end of the development, we presented it on an exposition to many NGOs which give us lot of feedback about the device’s usability. Also the NGOs demonstrate a huge interest in taking it to the market.

Our mission

“Improve the life quality of visually impaired people through universal access to assistive technologies.”

Values

• Ethics
• Economic, social and environmental sustainability
• Innovation
• Collaboration

Goals

• Create a business model that reaches 1 million people.
• Achieve economic sustainability within 1 year.
• Expand business to other countries within 3 years.