After 39 days of campaign, we are the seventh team to raise $ 6500. Now we are officially an Unreasonable Fellow!

Many thanks to all of our friends, sponsors, twitters and bloggers who have supported and disseminated this initiative!

It is beginning the second week of competition and now we can receive donations of up to $ 50. Remember that who donated in the first week can donate again in the second.

We thank all that collaborate and ask that you continue supporting us for outreach and contributions.

Let’s go!

Click the banner below to sponsor our idea and help millions of people with visual impairments to have access to low-cost technology:

The presentations will be held from January 26 to 29 in São Paulo, Brazil. Each entrepreneur will have 15 minutes to convince 4 specialists/investors that the project is inovative and have high impact. The investors will have 10 minutes to evaluate the project and the public will have 5 minutes to ask. The best 10 projects will be presented on saturday, Jan 30.

We will publish the presentation agenda soon.

Due to technical problems, the website’s feature to sponsor the AUIRE project in the Unreasonable Institute will open on January 25, 5pm (GMT -2). However, today the website will be launched and you can check our finalist profile and create your account to get ready for monday.

Read the official letter: Letter to Potential Unreasonable Sponsors.

Update: The sponsorship can be received after 5:00pm on January 25. (GMT -2)

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).

Read about our solution.

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.

Help us to reach 1 million people.

We were selected as an Unreasonable Fellow. but, you can still support us. Please click on the banners below to make your donation.

The Challenge

AUIRE was selected as a finalist in incubation program of Unreasonable Institute. It will be 10 weeks in Boulder, Colorado, USA, with 50 experts and investors like the ex-director of Coca-cola global marketing and the Google.org co-founder. To be selected as a finalist, AUIRE shows that your idea can become sustainable within 1 year, reach 1 million people and expand outside within 3 years.

This incubation program, including stay and alimentation, will cost US$6.500,00 for each enterprise. However entrepreneurs can not pay. Instead each one will collect donations in the Unreasonable Finalist site from Jan 22. In each week will have a limit for donations (only US$10 each person), selecting entrepreneurs who reach the greatest number of people.

Additional Information

See details of our application for Unreasonable Institute.

See our acceptation as a finalist at Unreasonable Institute.