Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DSS (Deaf Smart Space)
Período documentado: 2018-07-01 hasta 2019-05-31
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), partial hearing loss affects 466 million people worldwide and is likely to grow to one billion the next couple of decades due to the unsafe listening practices of the young generation (http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/deafness-and-hearing-loss(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)).
Visualfy delivers ICT hardware, services, and a smartphone app that enables people with hearing deficiencies to interact more seamlessly with their environment. Specifically, Deaf Smart Space-Home (Visualfy Home) provides accessibility in private homes, while Deaf Smart Space-Places (Visualfy Places) provides accessibility in buildings such as hotels, museums, hospitals, train stations, and shopping centres.
Visualfy's mission is to sustainably improve the quality of life and the level of independence of deaf, enabling their inclusion in society, we received among others the support of the Special Envoy on Disability and Accessibility at the United Nations (UN, http://unog.ch/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)). We, also, signed collaboration agreements with the Valencian Federation of Deaf (FESORD, www.fesord.org) the Spanish National Confederation of the Deaf (CNSE, www.cnse.es) the Spanish Confederation of Deaf Persons' Families (FIAPAS http://www.fiapas.es(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) and the Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel (SELA, www.sela.org.il).
Partly in parallel, we developed and started our first Visualfy Places pilot (https://www.visualfy.com/visualfy-places/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) making Montsant Hotel, a four-star establishment located at the foot of the Castle of Xativa in the Valencia Community, that has an outstanding restaurant and offers rooms for celebrations, and events for private and business purposes (http://mont-sant.com/en/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) truly accessible to deaf people.
Moreover, as part of our communication efforts, Visualfy was present with its own stand at the Mobile World Congress in 2018 and 2019 and received significant media coverage, for example, from CNN (https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=InP7DAKGXbw(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) or through Google as part of the “grow with Google” initiative (https://grow.google/intl/europe/story/4792824674385920(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) as well as the “I make Apps” initiative (https://www.blog.google/products/google-play/imakeapps-spanish-acrobat-makes-world-more-accessible-deaf-people/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) and finally we achieve the goal to becoming a Google featured App and which helped our App downloads to rise from 166 to 4168 a week.
Expected growth will allow us to put Visualfy on a solid ground, giving stability to the 24 jobs that we have created within Visualfy and the two new jobs created at our subcontractors. Further, we plan to expand our engagement with the federations throughout Spain, Europe, and around the World, with our commitment to donate 0.7% of profits to their educational programs, to enhance deafs’ participation in society, and improve deafs’ access to the labour market.