Key2enable Assistive Technology

Beneficiary & Problem

We have realized that children with physical and motor skills disabilities have severe difficulty in expression and are often ignored due to their inability to showcase their intellectual ability. However, with proper intellectual stimulation, especially in early childhood, can significantly accelerate their progress. Special educators, occupational therapists and parents have a hard time to come up with ways to communicate or tutor them and the whole process does not address the problem and is extremely cumbersome. On the other hand, only a fraction can afford assistive technology as they are usually very expensive and can be afforded only by a handful.

Bridging the gap

Realizing the problem above we have designed a set of simple plug and play hardware and a completely customizable educational platform that eliminate limitations of motor skills disabilities for the non-verbal and children in early childhood with disabilities. We aspire to bridge this gap between "disability" and "technology" leading to these children showcasing their true potential and accelerate their learning development. 

We have worked with specialists and experts in pedagogy as well as occupational therapists and special educators to design our solution. Since the idea itself was conceived by a man born with cerebral palsy, the pain points were very clear. We prototyped and went to schools with our MVP to test the efficacy of the solution and the results were astounding and led us to manufacture.

Our inputs were based on our in-person observation of the user group and feedback from teachers and parents over a period of evaluation and testing.

 Theory of Change

Problem Statement

Children with disabilities around the world are excluded from engaging in education 

Inputs

Activities

Outputs

Short-Term Outcomes

Mid-Term Outcomes

Long-Term Outcomes

Resources needed to accomplish our activities 

·    Financial Capital

·    Technologies

·    Specialists

·    Partnerships

·    Production Materials

Activities needed to reach our outcomes

·    Workshops

·    Trainings 

·    Learning activities

·    Services on Subscription

·    Policy advocacy

·    Delivery of products

Tangible results we aspire to produce through our activities in the next few years

·     Schools being inclusive

·   Children with disabilities empowered

·   Teachers trained

·     Parents educated    

Outcomes expected of our intervention(s)

Changes in:

·    Learning

·    Awareness

·    Knowledge

·    Attitudes

·    Skills

·    Opinions

·    Aspirations

·    Motivations

Outcomes we want to see in our intervention timeframe

Changes in:

·    Actions

·    Behaviours

·    Practices

·    Decisions

·    Policies

·    Social actions

Outcomes we hope to observe beyond our intervention timeframe.

Changes in:

·    Learning environment

·    Social contexts

·    Autonomy

·    Engagement

Impact

Inculcation of our solution would lead to countless children being able to communicate and engage autonomously leading to accelerated learning   

Our solution has been fueled by passion to address a very specific challenge that has not been viewed through the lenses of lower income and underserved communities. Since the inception of our solution, and witnessing its impact in-person led us to manufacturing and supplying to the governments and public schools who requested for our solution. We have been moving towards implementation and have not gathered "academic evidence", our evidence is based on our success stories on video. We are now developing a tool on our learning platform that would record response time and behavior changes amongst users, mapping their development curve. If selected and we get access to funds, it would be a simultaneous process. We are currently in Level 2 of the Nesta's Standards of Evidence.

Currently, we are tracking the impact through our online learning platform that records parameters of pedagogy and gives the instructor a clear view about the child's development. We are also collecting manual forms of periodic evaluations from the teachers.

Building a bridge between disabilities and technology leading to communication and learning through play while gathering evidence proving efficacy.

Research scope:-

·       There is an urgent need for an innovative gamified cost-effective hardware solution that involves the sensory aspects of children with disabilities, resulting in mind-matter connection and compliments Play Based Learning focusing on early childhood

·       Need for a multi-lingual, community-based learning platform supporting parents, professionals and schools

·       Working with children of different abilities for the past 7 years, we have witnessed the efficacy of Key2enable’s Key-X increasing attention span in children with ADHD leading to learning and honing of skills while accelerating their development as the sensory aspects get involved and non-verbal autistic children/ children with physical disabilities communicate through the Key-X in conjunction with the “alternative communication” feature on our learning-platform Expressia, when most conventional methods had failed to achieve results, however, we have not been able to analyse or document the behavioural/cognitive changes and efficacy, hence a data driven academic research/PoC is imperative

·    Importance of  the right Assistive-Technology and Neurodiversity/ Inclusion of children with disabilities

Deliverables:-

• A study proving the efficacy of the solution
• Academic warranty on work methodology of the solution, pertaining to children with disabilities
• Assistance on ideas to collate evidence and the parameters that would be credible
• Scale up ideas for hardware 
• Sustainability study

Projected outcome:-

• Our solution would have the backing of validated research which would help us to implement with specific institutions and governments 
• Attract investments from potential social impact investors/ investors
• Leading to consequential knowledge and business partnerships
• More underserved communities reached to due to scale and decreased cost of production
• Integration of learnings from the project