After her son was diagnosed with autism, Debbie Craig began looking at ways to remove the barriers to learning that children with additional educational needs experience. This was further fulled when as a result of the pandemic, SEN children and their families experienced unprecedented challenges, with autistic children struggling to cope with changes to their routine leading to increased levels of anxiety during the lockdown.

When Chelsea Elliott failed her eye screening, it revealed that she was blind in her left eye. This meant that for the next few days, she was making trips to eye doctors to determine the cause of her vision loss. After many trips back and forth, finally, a retina specialist named Jose “Pepe” Martinez made the diagnosis: Coats’ disease. This disease is rare, and causes monocular ailment, which facilitates the creation of blood vessels in the back of the eye, leading to constriction and rupture.

Emma Yang noticed that her grandma’s ability to recognize loved ones and her daily life were greatly impacted by Alzheimer's, and having grown up with her, she felt first-hand how the illness can affect not only the patient but the family, friends, and caregivers as well. This is what motivated Emma, at just 14 years old, to create Timeless.

Would you buy something you can’t see?

According to the NHS, 1 in 2 people will develop some form of cancer during their lifetime. Unfortunately, Fabian Bolin, a 32-year-old co-founder of "War on cancer" was one of those people, being diagnosed with leukemia in 2015. This was long before he would partner up with Sebastian Hermelin, his long-time friend, to develop this app, but was the stepping stone for it!

Christina Cran is 43 years old and Fin's mother. She had been struggling to stay active, struggled to go up a flight of stairs, lost weight, and had an unquenchable thirst, but as a busy mum working in public relations, she delayed going to the doctor until a bizarre blackness on her tongue left her with no choice. In October of 2014, after months of feeling this tired and unwell, she was finally diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a life-changing illness.

It is estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 seriously ill children need an intravenous (IV) line or catheter each year, just in Australia.

This was the stacking reality of Gold Coast boy, Oliver Glover. He was born premature, with a bowel obstruction, which lead him to go into surgery right after his birth and lose most of his small bowel in this process. He spent the first eight months of his life in hospital, which meant that he needed to get a central venous catheter in his chest, which provided him with Total parenteral nutrition (TPN) for six nights a week.

When Tiffany Brar was just six months old, she became blind all due to an overdose of oxygen. This lead her to understand that the day-to-day life of a visually impaired person was far different from the norm, with a big focus on the education aspect of it, as for her early childhood, while living in the UK, she 100% focused on learning by doing.

Back in 2003, Marx Melencio was buying fried rice, as he normally did, with his wife at a roadside store in Manila. All of a sudden, he was unexpectedly shot in the chest and the head in an apparently random attack, with the first bullet hitting him 3mm from his heart and the second missing his brain by 2mm but singed his optic nerve, rendering him blind.

After years of chronic pain and mobility limitations, Jane knew that something was up. It was not normal to have constant pain and inflammation without anything to pinpoint the source, and this lead her to investigate further and understand where it was coming from. After many months of going to the doctors and getting nowhere, Jane was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a connective tissue disorder in which the body does not produce the correct collagen, resulting in overly stretchy tissue.

Terri Bryant was a celebrity makeup artist and beauty educator. for many years, when at the height of her career, she started to experience a loss of dexterity in her hand which led to challenges applying makeup, either due to tremours or even due to the inability of picking up small objects. Not much time passed until she eventually was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. This was a devastating blow to the make-up artist, as she used her hands to do due her craft.

Revision was born out of the necessity to make exercise available to everyone, even if blind.

Going on vacation can pose a unique challenge for people with physical disabilities. This was a huge concern for Alvaro Silberstein, when he began trying to go and explore Torres del Paine National Park in Chile back in 2016. This kind of trip, with such rough terrain and not that many disability-accessible options, was a nightmare for Alvaro, as he was left paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair after a car accident as a teenager.

After a motorcycle accident at 14 years old, Brandon Winfield (he/him) was diagnosed with a thoracic spinal cord injury, which meant that he became paralyzed from the waist down. This completely changed his life, as he once loved to race, he now wasn't able to.

When Zuby Onwuta told people around him that he could make his eyesight better just by thinking, no one around him believed in it, with some of them thinking he was just a crazy person.

This all began in 2012 when Zuby could see clearly one day and the very next one, it became impossible to see exactly the same thing and with no explanation! After meeting with nearly 300 eyecare professionals, he got his diagnosis, which was a very rare retinal disease called Stargardt with cone and rod dystrophy.

Adriana Mallozzi was born with cerebral palsy and was first introduced to a power wheelchair, covered with unique technologies, at age 9, leading her to embrace technology at a very young age rendering her increasingly independent. By using pressurized air, she could open the door to her apartment by simply blowing on a tube connected to the remote control, move her chair by controlling a joystick with her mouth and so much more. The day-to-day struggles also pushed Adriana to become as inventive as possible, due to the need to perform her routines and tasks as independently as possible.

More than 1% of people in the world stutter; and one of them is Gareth Walkom, a 24-year-old student at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. He has been stuttering since the age of six, and it has affected him throughout his life. From the fear of talking to someone that he doesn't know to trying to say his name. correctly and clearly, Gareth knows firsthand how unbearable a stutter can sometimes be, and he wanted to help people like himself to control their stutter.

This led Gareth to build a Virtual World to help people who stutter, and so withVR was born!

Vanessa Castañeda Gill was first diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and ADHD at 14 years old and didn’t meet another autistic woman until the age of 20 years old. This meant that she had no autistic female role models or sense of autistic identity until she got to college, which led her down a challenging road throughout her teenage years. Unfortunately, until this point, she only had heard stereotypical things of autistic people, such as being “bad at social connection” and believed that her only choice was to fit that mold, despite her desire for connection.

When Stephen Eades' daughter was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, he worried about many, many things, but one of the main things was her independence. How would she live without him and her mum being around her 24/7? How would she cope with the demands of a new and scary world?

Stephen knew that he could not be always there, by her side, but he could do something to help her navigate these uncharted waters. This is when he sought to create a technology that would help her live her life independently, which led him to create iCan!

Saïda is profoundly deaf, and although she was born hard of hearing, no one knew about her hearing disability until she was eight or nine years old. At 10 she was then introduced to the world of sounds by wearing hearing aids, where the first thing she ever heard was the sound of an air conditioner and two people talking in a room. At that moment, she realized that each person has a unique voice of their own and that everything has a sound.