An Indian start-up has won a $1 million prize for a tiny device that promotes women’s safety.
Named Leaf Wearables, the New Delhi-based company creates smart jewellery products that double up as safety devices.
One of its flagship products, the SAFER Pro won the Women’s Safety Xprize award at the ceremony held at the United Nations in New York last night.
“We have been working tirelessly to solve the problems of safety using technology,” said Leaf Wearables’ team leader Manik Mehta. “It has been our mission to make one billion families safety.”
Global solutions to global challenges
If you’ve never heard of Xprize before, it is a series of competitions that challenge companies across the world to solve humanity’s biggest problems.
Challenges range from getting to the bottom of the ocean to improving adult literacy and education around the globe.
The Women’s Safety Xprize was founded by two philanthropists, Anu and Naveen Jain who wanted to solve the safety problems women face around the globe.
Across the world, one in three women have faced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.
To solve this problem, the Xprize competition had a tough brief.
The winning solution had to be able to autonomously and discreetly trigger an emergency alert, whilst also transmitting information to a network of community responders, within 90 seconds.
Not only that, the winning tech had to cost no more than $40, to ensure it was an affordable solution.
Leaf Wearables was able to demonstrate this with SAFER Pro device.
“Women’s safety is not just a third world problem; we face it every day in our own country and on our college campuses. It’s not a red state problem or a blue state problem but a national problem,” said Naveen Jain.
“We are thrilled to announce the winning solution and are confident that all the teams that competed will provide many options and tools to millions of communities around the world to ensure the safety of its members.”
Dr Peter H Diamandis, founder and CEO of Xprize, congratulated the winning team.
“Watching the winning solution in action in communities and college campuses helped us to demonstrate that breakthrough solutions are borderless and can help aid humanity on our most challenging global issues like universal safety,” he said.
Sursa: standard.co.uk