Arun has a Master degree in Biomedical Engineering and worked as a patents analyst. He applied to a Social Innovation Immersion Programme when he started working on his solution to avoiding preventable deaths of mothers-to-be and babies.

Heather was a kindergarten teacher who started uploading fiction about women’s sexuality online.

From this, people began writing to her, asking about sexual reproductive health and sex. The teacher wanted to help them and reply, but she didn’t have the means to. So she decided to create her own solution and launch her own website: Scarleteen. This was the first website of its kind, featuring questions and responses about sexual health and sex.

Pamela, Ruth’s sister, was 23 years old when she started to become very thin, losing her hair and getting a skin rash. She was HIV positive but didn’t know due to lack of awareness and information. Because of that, she didn’t get medical treatment right away.

“She was taken to a witch doctor to be cleansed of demons. When she eventually did get taken to hospital, it was too late and she died there”, Ruth recalled.

This drove Ruth to want to help people know about sexual health. So she built Ask Without Shame after joining a social innovation academy.

Bessie studied physiotherapy and industrial design. She went to work at Veterans’ Hospital Base 81, where she helped to rehabilitate World War II veterans, especially those who were disabled and trying to readapt to their lives stateside.

“You’re not crippled, only crippled in your mind,” she would tell them while teaching them how to write with their feet or their teeth.

You Are Loved was launched in 2018 and works by allowing the users to rate their experiences, each day, on a scale from 0 to 10. The app also allows users to track their mood and have conversations with other app users (family and friends).

“I basically just want to create something that could really help people struggling with mental health issues, or depression or anxiety, and that’s kind of what I want to do for the rest of my life,” he explained.

The first-year students from 2018 at UW got a mental health first aid kit for the first time, during orientation.

The kit is called PASS (panic, anxiety and stress support) was created by Tina Chan, who suffered from anxiety.

They have been distributed to small groups and UW students, workplaces and veterans since 2015. UW bought 7100 PASS kits and gave them to first-year students in 2018.

Wazi Vision develops a mobile app that relies on virtual reality do perform visual acuity tests. They also provide children with affordable glasses made of recycled plastic built by female artisans from Uganda.

With this, the company is able to reduce the costs of producing these devices by 80% (without compromising the quality), while making sure more people are able to access eye testing services. Wazi Vision also carries out tests on the field, free testing in schools and rural areas in Uganda.

Senso consists of an innovation that detects possible danger through sound. The wristband detects sound and lets the user know via vibration and a LED light, helping deaf and hearing impaired patients be more aware of their surroundings.

Zuko created Senso because he wanted to help his aunt. However, when he went to look for solutions in the market, either they were too expensive or too intrusive.

With this solution, patients who are deaf or mute can communicate more easily with the general public.

“My niece wears the gloves, pairs them with her phone or mine, then starts signing. I’m able to understand what she’s saying,” Roy explained.
Sign-IO works by recognising different signed letters and transmitting this data to an Android app, that later vocalises this information.

The app allows the users to set the language, gender and pitch of the audio voice (accuracy results of 93%).

Yoon spent two years in South Korean Military. He struggled with feelings of detachment and loneliness, so we wanted to do something to improve mental health by alleviating loneliness.

Pop is an app that focuses on the users’ interests and availability to match students for hour-long periods to meet. He started out by testing the idea for this solution by creating a lunch-buddy style program that paired students who signed up via a Google form.

“I was collecting medication from my public clinic in Bophelong township in Vanderbijlpark, an industrial manufacturing small town. The initial treatment phase of my disease was six months. During my treatment, my biggest challenge was the long waiting times at the clinic, I was losing over three hours on long queues with every visit. Most of the other patients that waited along with me had to miss work just to collect their medicine”, the inventor, who founded his company around this solution, explained.

These girls, who called themselves “The Restorers” created i-Cut, an app the allows young women to get medical and legal help before or after being submitted to FGM. The app allows to user to choose from main options: “help,” “rescue,” “report,” “information on FGM” and “donate and feedback.” Which means that, through this tool, girls who are forced to undergo the procedure can alert authorities and ask for help and survivors can report and get help from local centres. All of these just at the reach of a button.

After watching his grandmother forgetting things and struggle with simple daily tasks, he started thinking about potential solutions.

“I couldn’t take care of her because I didn’t know what she was trying to tell me. If only I could know what she’s thinking. If only I could read her thoughts”, he recalled.

“When I was taking care of my grandpa, I realised there were many things that he had trouble doing in his daily life, so he became more dependent on family members. One of his biggest problems was going to the bathroom. And this was something I wanted to change because for people with Parkinson’s, especially when they have an urgent need to sit down and use the toilet, the act of turning around can be difficult and cause injury”, she explained.

Hen Yin Qi was driven to invent this solution because her aunt suffers from Parkinson’s disease and struggles with simple tasks.

"I could see her struggling with drinking water or writing because her hands were shaking", the inventor explained.

The innovation - called Shaky - is a device that can be attached to objects such as utensils, plates and cups to monitor tremors, aimed at helping to manage Parkinson's disease and perform simple daily tasks like drinking. It can also counter the tremors and stabilise the objects.

It was the lack of solutions that made Toby create his own device to help him communicate. At the time, the traditional method was the alphabet card. But this would take a lot of time, as the user had to take a long time to go through all the rows and letters to form words.

After some intense physiotherapy and rehabilitation, Toby, who was an engineer, was able to gain some movement in his hands. That’s when he had the idea to build a portable communication aid - the Lightwriter - a typewriter which instead of typing on paper, typed the message on an LCD display.

During his visit to these remote villages, the student realised that the technology was, in fact, marginalising users who didn’t have access to it. As he said, “technology is making them even more disabled”.

The adaptive technology available in India for blind people was not the best for them, as regional dialects and accents can make the English-language artificial voice difficult for a lot of people to understand. Also, this means a lack of privacy for the user as text messages and emails are read aloud by the automated voice.

The child’s therapist told the parents about Go Baby Go - a program that gives kids with physical disabilities modified cars. However, they didn’t have a chapter near Cilian’s home. And motorised wheelchairs are too expensive.

So the boy’s parents turned to the robotics team from the local high school and present them with the challenge of creating a robotic car for their son. They accepted the challenge and took action.

Nuala was driven to create this solution after her own experiences during pregnancy.

“Some 70 per cent of new mums aren’t aware they are suffering from maternal mental health and related issues so at Moment Health we are launching our #CheckYourSymptoms campaign in order to appeal to mums to acknowledge they could be suffering and to speak up, seek help and ultimately save their life”, she explained.

“I could see how much she was struggling to do her daily tasks, and I wanted to make a wheelchair that would really suit her needs – one that would make her independent and mobile, comfortable and happy,” he explained.

There are no wheelchair ramps in Kenya, and according to Peter, most of the wheelchair is limited to a single function. And some are for suited to flat surfaces, others to rough terrain, etc.