VijoGeo

Gun violence - accidental or intentional - is epidemic particularly among young people. And while safe gun storage is required in many states, nearly 4.6 million children live in homes where guns are not locked away. Traditional storages systems like cases and safes can be costly, and many gun owners reject anything they perceive to limit access to their firearm, leaving open the door to tragedy. This is where VijoGeo comes in. Imagine if you had a device that was discrete, affordable for everyone, and would alert you immediately through text or an app any time your firearm was moved or its case opened? And imagine if those alerts came no matter how far away you were? With VijoGeo, these real-time alerts allow potentially life-saving interventions that don't compromise access and function concerns. 

There are over 393 million civilian-owned firearms in America, and since the beginning of the pandemic, this number grows everyday. And while a secured firearm is a safer firearm, over 4.6 million children live in a home with a firearm (and usually more than just one), that is unsecured. According to the Brady Campaign, 22 children and teens are shot in the United States, and of these, 8 are shot in unintentional "family fire" incidents. Approximately 77% of these deaths happen in the home. Data suggests that nearly 31% of accidental deaths caused by firearms might be prevented by simply securing firearms and keeping them out of reach of children. 

But simply securing firearms isn't enough.

In 2014, 11-year old Tyler Paxton told his parents he was going upstairs to watch cartoons. Instead, he took the key to his parents' gun safe, removed a loaded revolver, and fatally shot himself in the head. His parents did most everything right and it still wasn't enough.

Imagine, however, that this safe was equipped with a simple device that would send a text or alert with any motion or security breach. This is the kind of life-saving impact we KNOW VijoGeo can make.

VijoGeo is a patent-pending device that affixes to gun cases, gun safes, or any place or container in which a gun is stored. When the case or area is disturbed, the device sends a signal to a server that alerts the registered user via SMS text message or through a mobile app that the status of the device has changed. These real-time alerts are an improvement over traditional gun storage, in that the user does not need to be near or even physically present to know that the status of security has been disturbed or breached, allowing immediate response to a potentially dangerous situation. While this alert is useful in terms of theft and loss, the biggest application is to alert gun owners to a change that may require immediate intervention, specifically going to the location where their item is stored or contacting law enforcement or first responders to conduct wellness checks. In the case of a child or other vulnerable individual, this can mean the difference between life and death.

Though I currently reside in an urban Native community, I grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and know that gun ownership is prevalent in both communities. Whereas gun violence is high in urban settings, it is also prevalent on the reservation. Additionally, unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for Native youth and teens, followed by suicide as the second highest cause of death. By empowering families and homes with tools to detect that a gun has been removed or its storage even opened or disturbed allows critical time for intervention. And because reservation communities often lack WiFi, our system also functions via cellular connectivity and in-home base stations. By design, our solution would be affordable and therefore available to everyone, or certainly appropriate for tribal governments to obtain and distribute in the same way the VA makes gun locks free and available.

As described earlier, unintentional injury and suicide are significant health risks for Native youth and young adults, whether on the reservation or in urban environments. We know that VijoGeo could be an important intervention or deterrent with regards to accidental firearm injury or death. But because firearms are the second leading method of completed suicide among Native people, VijoGeo has application in suicide prevention. Shared with support systems and clinicians, VijoGeo alerts to a change in firearm status can allow for immediate intervention as well as potentially interrupt the impulse for self-harm.

I recently completed the Conscious Venture Lab accelerator and continue working with my mentor and team as we move from the early prototype to minimally viable prototype stage. Currently, we our team is working on a next-generation prototype and creating a product requirements document for manufacture and raising capital. Our team also includes a researcher, computer scientist, and business development consultant to move the idea from prototype to production to sales.

As described earlier, traditional gun cases and safes are a good step in securing firearms but can be easily breached. VijoGeo improves on this by providing real-time alerts any time a change in status is detected. This could be as simple as a child trying to figure out how to open a case or an intentioned teenager unlocking a case. This is a key difference, reiterated throughout this application: a traditional gun case or safe won't tell you that it's been opened and if you are away from your case, there is no way for you to know that it happened. With VijoGeo, you could be outside or miles away and know that the status of your has firearm changed with an immediate alert, giving you the opportunity to call home, return home, or call 911 for urgent intervention.  Although VijoGeo is ideologically neutral (meaning, we want to appeal to those who support gun control as much as those who support the Second Amendment), it is aligned with the Safe Gun Storage Legislation introduced by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in 2021. We are hopeful that this innovation would move other gun and gun safety accessory manufacturers work harder to ensure that unintentional injury or death by firearm is greatly reduced. 

The core technology of VijoGeo aligns with the Internet of Things. The device itself will use acceleromter technology and perhaps infrared. This technology will detect disruption of status and alert the user via SMS text message and/or mobile app according to user preference and access to internet or cellular service. The ability to offer real-time alerts of change in status or breach is an improvement over traditional firearms storage and is what makes VijoGeo uniquely positioned to solve this problem.

Our solution uses an extremely common item in modern technology: the accelerometer. Since its invention, it has seen widespread adoption in the fields of consumer electronics, navigation, and even biology, to name a few. [1] The example that most would be intimately familiar is the cell phone. Most modern cell phones have accelerometers, and they are used in many ways.
For example, the action of rotating the screen from portrait to landscape is accomplished by measuring the direction at which the acceleration due to gravity is acting. This measurement determines what orientation the user is holding the phone in. If (relative to a portrait view of the phone) gravity is acting up or down, the software can assume the user is holding it in portrait. If gravity is acting more toward the left or right, the user is probably holding the phone in landscape.
Another example is the use of the phone as a pedometer. By reacting to accelerometer inputs and passing them through an algorithm (e.g. see [2]), the phone can distinguish the motion of walking and approximate the number of steps the user has taken throughout the day. This proves that accelerometers can be used to sense physical events as they occur, and allow software to take action accordingly.

 [1] https://www.livescience.com/40...
[2] https://github.com/nerajbobra/...

There are few risks worth considering in the operation of the device, aside from the possibility of an error or connectivity loss preventing an urgent notification from being sent or received. The primary risks would lie in the cybersecurity realm, as the device would be sending real-time notifications to a server which may need to be stored for some unknown amount of time. Along with this, user billing details and other personal information may be present.

The way to solve this problem is by implementing proper cybersecurity practices and by building the app and server infrastructure in a way that is as secure as possible. A complete analysis and determination of proper practices must be completed before our device reaches maturity.



Along with this, our goal is to not store any information that is not absolutely necessary to the proper operation of the device. Certain details are unavoidable, like billing as mentioned. However, most other information is transitory in nature and can thus be discarded (and perhaps securely erased) when the action is complete.

Accidental injury and death related to firearms is a significant concern in the US. This relates not only to the 77% of these incidents that occur in the home, but also the unfortunate incidences of gun use in domestic violence and mass shootings, such as Parkland or Columbine. Everyone is or will be impacted by this concern, regardless of where they live. The prevalence of shooting incidents in this year alone make that stark. 

With VijoGeo, we seek to reduce the incidences of injury and death (intentional or unintentional) related to firearms. If we are successful, homes where guns are present will have access to and use our product so that firearms are not merely secured but have an additional layer of protection that both prevents unauthorized access and alerts in the event of security breach so that immediate action can be taken. This could look like going into the home and stopping a child from trying to open a gun safe or calling authorities when it is apparent that the gun has been removed without authorization. We think of mass shootings in schools and how these may have been avoided had parents been able to equip their gun storage with devices like VijoGeo.

For us, the ideal theory of change would involve bringing VijoGeo to market so that it would be accessible to communities and tribes, functional in both urban and rural settings, easy to install and use, and in as many homes as possible to minimize access to firearms that could result in injury or death due to accidental or intentional discharge of firearms. For us, the end result is safer homes, safer communities, and safer Native nations.

At present, VijoGeo is in the prototype stage, working with our team and a local manufacturer to create a minimally viable prototype (MVP). With an MVP, we intend to raise capital through a crowdfunding campaign, sell initial units, and then produce at least 2500 units within year one. We plan to aggressively market VijoGeo as we believe in its potential as a tool to reduce injury and death by firearms. We seek partnerships through organizations such as Giffords Center, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Brady Campaign. In five years, our goal is that in a country where there are 22 million children living in homes with firearms (4.6 million of them living where guns are unsecured), VijoGeo can be in 3% of these homes.

Research shows that securely storing firearms is vital in preventing unintentional shootings and gun suicides. A recent study found that homes that secured firearms and ammunition were associated with a 78 percent lower risk of self-inflicted firearm injuries and an 85 percent lower risk of unintentional firearm. We believe that VijoGeo has a role to play in prevention and reduction but our first and necessary step is bringing our device to market and into homes.

VijoGeo intends to move a minimally viable prototype (3Q21) to production (1Q22). We intend to start sales through crowdfunding, then e-commerce, and finally B2B2C retail.

As VijoGeo is not yet in full-production or in homes, we have no immediate measures. Nevertheless, VijoGeo has members of the local Native community who are both gun owners and have children in the home, eager to test this product and provide feedback. VijoGeo's system of status checks and alerts will also provide some data on how the device works in preventing unauthorized access, theft, and use of firearms. It will also be necessary to work with partners such as early adopters, legislators, law enforcement, and first responders to determine correlation between the presence of VijoGeo and interventions that prevent or minimize the gravity of an event involving firearms.

The initial barrier to VijoGeo's achievement of our goals is the difficulty in raising capital to launch. As a Native American man without a college education, currently residing in transitional housing, and having limited to no access to financial resources is daunting. But as we continue to press forward with help from our business mentor and the Conscious Venture Lab network, we are undeterred. 

Adequate capital will be required to ensure our ability to manufacture and market VijoGeo, to conduct research around consumer satisfaction and impact, maintain and update technology, and successfully defend our patent application. It may make the most sense to identify partners with similar goals and/or established in the firearms and firearms security market.

It will also be important for VijoGeo to appeal to and build trust on both sides of the gun debate, demonstrating that VijoGeo is interested in neither restricting gun ownership or deregulating, but simply providing the tools for those who own or live in homes with firearms to keep not only themselves safe, but the community as a whole.

FINANCIAL: As indicated prior, partnerships may be important in overcoming these barriers as may be participation in future accelerator or incubator opportunities.

COMMUNITY: It is also vitally important to ensure that we remain ideologically neutral so that our solution is accessible to everyone, regardless of how they feel about the "third rail" debates around guns. 

Currently, there are no paid members of the team. Virgil Pain On Hip (Oglala Sioux Tribe) is the founder and CEO and his vision is supported by an entirely volunteer team of two Native women (researcher and business consultant), a computer scientist and programmer, and three business mentor (Brian LeGette).

Virgil Pain On Hip's lived experiences in both urban and reservation settings, including threats of and loss related to gun violence, provide him with a unique perspective and commitment. Having survived foster care, gang affiliation, and corrections, Pain On Hip understands the issue on a deeply personal level, reflective of the communities and culture from which he comes.

Researcher and applied medical anthropologist Kerry Hawk Lessard (Shawnee/Hohe) has worked with business anthropologist G. Clothaire Rapaille and works currently within the field of Urban Indian Health, exploring the issue at both the community level and in terms of marketing.

Business consultant Eva King (Piscataway) shares her professional experience with start ups as a member of the local Native community committed to the success and financial security of its members.

Caleb Godwin is employed full-time with Baltimore-based digital services firm Fearless, and has been involved since the beginning of this project.

Brian LeGette has more than 20 years of experience in businesses development and has secured over 50 national and international patents. He serves as a mentor with SHIFT Venture's Conscious Venture Lab.

VijoGeo is a Native led venture that is supported by a team of majority Native women. A participant of Conscious Venture Labs, VijoGeo is committed to conscious capitalism as espoused by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia. As such, VijoGeo strives to be socially responsible, ethical, and equitable. VijoGeo seeks to uplift and benefit communities of color and other under-resourced communities at all points during decision-making.

I am applying to Solve because I believe in VijoGeo's ability to save lives. Having been personally threatened with gun violence and having lost family members to both unintended firearms-related death and suicide, the issue is urgent and personal.

Living in Baltimore, gun violence is epidemic. Living in the US, gun violence is epidemic. It has to stop and I believe I can be part of it.

My current team is wonderful but with the exception of my mentor, they are community members who believe in me and my solution enough to donate time, effort, and money.If my solution is selected, I am hopeful that barriers of funding can be addressed, certainly, but just as important, I hope to have access to a team of mentors, peers, and innovators that can take my idea from just that - an idea - to a real, tangible, impactful solution. 

I am hopeful that, if selected, I will have access to change-makers who believe in my idea and its ability to create change, so that I can gain traction that would otherwise be difficult.

Again, as someone who has overcome very challenging formative experiences and who has personally dealt with the issues I am trying to solve, a network of the right support is invaluable.

I am in need of all the support I can get and am willing to take the advice given. I am willing to work hard to make my dream a reality. I believe in the potential impact of my idea and am willing to do whatever is necessary to see it launched.

Early in thinking about my idea, I was able to meet with two MIT alums and know that the caliber of their experience reflects what MIT faculty and initiatives offer. I am interested in partnering with organization seeking to prevent gun violence but interested also in working with brands already established and trusted within the market of gun owners.

VijoGeo seeks to address a problem - gun violence - that is a crisis negatively impacting the health and social function of Americans but also improving safety and well-being. Children lost to gun violence don't have a future to dream and achieve. I am trying to change that.