Stacy Zoern suffers from spinal muscular atrophy and has always needed a wheelchair to dislocate herself. This motivated her to create a solution to help others in the same situation and to become more independent.

So, she came up with Kenguru cars, designed in a way that allows easy access for wheelchair users. The car that provides easy access and drivability, without ever getting out of the wheelchair.

The car is environmentally friendly and, reaching a maximum speed of around 56 Km/h, is ideal for short-distance drives around the neighbourhood and city streets.

Suffering from cerebral palsy means, for Paul Doherty, that he depends on the use of either a wheelchair or a walker to his daily life.

As the snow appeared and the streets became covered in snow, he came up with an idea: he transformed his electrical wheelchair into a snowplough. To do this, he connected a rake to the front of the wheelchair.

This allowed him to be able to help his family by clearing a path in the snow, despite his disease. After several hours of hard work, he managed to clean the street.

Eino Lammi was 92 when he fell off a ladder while cleaning the gutters on his house. Eino strongly disliked that the injuries caused by the event forced him to recover in a nursing home away from his family.

This, however, inspired his grandson, Jesse Lammi, to develop a new solution. He created NextDoor Housing, a new type of housing that allows old patients to recover close to their families. To achieve his goal, Jesse team up with his friend John Louiselle.

"The whole purpose is to keep people out of institutions," said Jesse.

Jim has been a farmer his whole life. At 92, however, due to some problems with his knees, it became difficult to climb to the combine harvester. Despite his knees problem, Jim wasn’t going to give up on his passion. ‘You have to understand: I needed to pick my corn so this was going to get done’, he said.

The farmer looked for existent solutions that could help him get up in the cab, but they seemed very expensive.

That is when he came up with his solution. He created a motorised elevator to lift him up into the cab during the harvest season.

Lisandro Sona was born with spina bifida. Spina bifida is a birth defect that occurs when the spine and spinal cord don't form properly. If the spina bifida is severe, it can lead to significant physical disabilities.

Due to the disease, Lisandro has always needed to use a wheelchair to dislocate himself.

Type 1 diabetes is caused when the pancreas fails to produce enough insulin. Insulin is what helps the body turn glucose from sugar into energy. Without insulin, sugar builds up in the blood stream. With too much insulin, sugar can fall to dangerously low levels. For insulin-dependent diabetics, keep glucose levels stable is a constant challenge.

After Aline Bezzoco’s friend tried to commit suicide, she heard prejudiced comments from other people about what happened.

This inspired her to create a mobile app, called ‘Tá Tudo Bem?’, with the intention of helping in the prevention of suicide. With the help of a psychologist, Wanessa Lisbôa, she developed an app that both informs and guides the user.

Some of the app’s functionalities are also based on experiences Aline has had herself. For example, one of the exercises includes listing all good things that happened with the user.

Ethan Shallcross suffers from a form of autism.

After feeling like there was not a good solution available to manage his own symptoms, he decided to create the app Aumi.

“I wanted a way to track my mood with notifications and to make meetings with people who were supporting me with my mental health easier”, Ethan explained.

After Chris Benoit and Alexis Liddell’s grandmother had a stroke, she suffered memory loss.

This made communication with their grandmother become very difficult. "We struggled," said Alexis. "Communication was the toughest. We'd leave the visits with her feeling exhausted, frustrated, mad and sad. We figured we're not the only ones having trouble with this."

Gracie Benedith-Cane’s son, Wani, was less than one year old, when he was diagnosed with septo-optic nerve dysplasia, a rare congenital malformation that can feature underdevelopment of the optic nerve, pituitary gland dysfunction, and absence of the septum pellucidum (a midline part of the brain).

“I realised something was going on with his eyes when he was two months,” she said, “I took him to the doctor, and he told me that he wasn’t going to have 100 percent of his vision.

Marcela Guimoye's daughter, Camila Chang, suffers from autism.

Knowing what it is like to grow a daughter with this disease, Marcela saw how Camila had severe behavioral problems and struggled to learn how to talk. "During summer time, there was no place that could accept her because of her behaviors", Marcela said.

After a visit to a friend’s sick son who had been hospitalised for a long period, Kevin Gatlin realized that there wasn’t much stimulation to keep the children occupied at the hospital.

That is when he decided to create bed sheets that would help kids be entertained and cope better with long hospitalisations.

Christopher Miquel has two kids with allergies. "I have two kids with allergies. My son Antonio has a dairy allergy and my daughter Victoria has a nut allergy," said Miquel. "Over the years, it has been a struggle to deal with. What they can eat or what they can't."

"The biggest issue is when they go out to a friends house or a family members house to make sure they know what they can and can't eat," added Miquel. "That has been the biggest issue when they are away from us."

Abi Huskins thought that her sons Ivan and Ian were very malnourished, but she soon realised that her sons kept low levels of haemoglobin; a protein found in blood cells that carries oxygen. She then tested them for sickle cell disease (SCD), which came positive. SCD can cause blockages of blood flow in different parts of the body, and so, many children with SCD end up having to receive frequent blood transfusions.

Marc and Tina Zimmerman learn that their identical twins Jason and Jared had autism.

In order to try to help their children socialize, the couple created an app called The Social Express. “It was very difficult because all of our nieces and nephews are highly social and have always had a lot of friends and play dates,” Marc said. “Our kids never had many play dates and if put into a social situation, they would just go sit alone in a corner.”

The app allows users to identify their feelings by selecting an emotion and a corresponding coping strategy.

When Jonathan Izak graduated from university, his little brother Oriel was 10 years old and suffered from autism.

Izak thought that the options in the market were not good enough. “They’re big, bulky, and expensive,” he said. “Some of them can be between $9,000 and $12,000, and provide only limited functionality.”

Коли дівчинка навчалася в середній школі, Аманда Саутворт страждала від тривоги та депресії. «Це почалося для мене ще в середній школі, коли у мене було багато проблем із психічним здоров’ям, я мала депресією та тривогу», – казала вона.
Власні проблеми спонукали її створити платформу для допомоги людям, які живуть з цим типом розладів. «Після того, як я пройшла через ці труднощі, я хотіла створити рішення все-в-одному, де кожен міг би знайти інформацію, ресурси та інструменти», — пояснила вона.

Keira Kotler was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 40 and had to be submitted to a mastectomy as part of the treatment.

Chieko Asakawa was 14 when she became blind after an accident in a swimming pool. Since then she has innovated to help the visually impaired like her.

One of her innovations to help the blind is called NavCog. Working with IBM; she created a mobile application which is controlled by voice, and helps blind people navigate complicated indoor locations.

Kirsten Quist had a baby, called Emma. But soon she received some discouraging news. “The pediatrician came in and told me my baby’s clavicle was broken,” she said. “My first question was, ‘what brace do I buy?’ and then the doctor told me, ‘there isn’t one,“ she said.

So, she searched the net to try to find a solution to relieve her newborn daughter’s discomfort. Unfortunately, she could not find a solution for her baby. Kirsten, who is also a nurse, thought “we do this for adults, why don’t we do this for babies”.