‘Leaf Wearables’ wins $1M for women’s safety device ‘SAFER Pro’

Last Updated on August 12, 2018 by Bharat Saini

SAFER Pro, a smart safety device that sends emergency alerts with location details to users’ guardians when they sense danger, from New Delhi based Leaf Wearables, was awarded on Thursday June 7, 2018, $1 Million Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPrize, at the United Nations in New York City. SAFER Pro is a small chip that can ultimately be put into any device or jewelry with a discreet emergency alert button. When the alert is received, it additionally lets you record audio from the time of the alert.

Leaf Wearables, an Indian start-up by Manik Mehta, Avinash Bansal, and Niharika Rajiv, the students of Delhi Technological University (Delhi College of Engineering) and IIT Delhi, were also chosen amongst the top 10 innovative startups in India by Department of Science and Technology who accompanied Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his visit to Silicon Valley to participate in first India-U.S. Startup Konnect in September 2015.

Leaf Wearables’ Manik Mehta said, “It was in 2012 that the Nirbhaya rape took place in Delhi,” adding that it was then that they decided: “Enough is enough. Delhi is unsafe and things are not changing at all. We have got to solve this problem.”

XPRIZE incetivises world’s brightest minds to solve humanity’s toughest problems and partners up to create specific challenges aimed at getting small companies to create products that can help to achieve the goals. One of these challenges was the $1 million Anu and Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE, launched in October 2016 by entrepreneurs and philanthropists, Anu and Naveen Jain, to address the safety of women and girls by leveraging technology that challenged innovators around the world to create a device that can inconspicuously trigger an emergency alert if a woman is facing a threat and transmit information to a network of community responders, all within 90 seconds and costing under $40.

A diverse range of 85 initial teams from 18 countries including, United States, India, Switzerland, Canada, Spain, Germany, China and United Arab Emirates, accepted the challenge. Among all competing teams were app developers, technology researchers, top-tier academic institutions and startups working toward safety for women worldwide.

The five finalist solutions were tested to see how the devices might fare across a variety of environments including high rise office buildings, college campuses, in public transit, and at home. Devices ranged from smart jewelry that can trigger emergency alerts to other wearables that detect physical gestures and speech recognition for emergency triggers. Most importantly, all of the solutions from the finalist teams work in areas of no cell connection. The other finalists were:

• Artemisfrom Lausanne, Switzerland, Led by Dr. Nicee Srivastava, is developing a device that can be used to trigger an alert not just by a gesture, but also by seamlessly tracking emotional threat levels.

• Nimb & SafeTrek from Los Altos, CA and St. Louis, MO, United States, Led by Leo Bereschanskiy and Nick Droege, Nimb collaborates with SafeTrek to provide their customers an option to call for professional emergency services with just a touch of the thumb. The company was founded in response to rising concerns about safety on and off campus. Both teams work together to make the world a safer place.
• Saffron from Bellevue, WA, United States; Tsinghua, China, Led by Nicholas Becker is collaboration between the University of Washington and Tsinghua University through the Global Innovation eXchange (GIX), focused on developing wearable sensors and machine learning algorithms to create inconspicuous technologies that improve the safety and well-being of women around the world.
• Soterra from Bethlehem, PA, United States, Led by Lena McDonnell used a combination of global positioning services, cellular data and bluetooth to build a versatile, reliable and affordable network to connect women to emergency support systems.

“Through XPRIZE, we made our philanthropic efforts targeted for exponential impact and spurred breakthrough solutions for women and girls’ safety farther and faster. To anyone who wants to make a radical difference in the world, we need to empower them to take action,” added Anu Jain.

Anu Jain said at the award ceremony, “Safety is a fundamental human right and shouldn’t be considered a luxury for women. It is the foundation in achieving gender equality.” “Women safety is a global problem, it’s a global epidemic. A safe environment for women is a fundamental human right, it should not be considered a luxury and yet in today’s world, with so much advancement in technology and innovation, we still have not been able to solve this problem”.

Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, founder and CEO of XPRIZE said, “I wish to also congratulate Leaf Wearables and all of the teams who competed in the Women’s Safety XPRIZE. Watching the winning solution in action in communities and college campuses helped us to demonstrate that breakthrough solutions are borderless and exponential technology can help aid humanity in our most challenging global issues like universal safety.”