Blee Watch is our first product where we essentially convey different sounds like doorbell, baby crying, fire alarm, any sound through vibrations & visual alerts. So the watch will listen to your environment, whenever any sound occurs, if that is already in your app, you will get notified for it. Other features like text to speech templates are there. Then there is one more feature where you can just press a button & your location is shared with five of your emergency contacts. This feature allows them to be connected with the loved ones at all times.

We were studying in MIT Design School in Pune. When we started, back in college, it was just a project where we were converting choreography counts into vibrations. We went for a dance programme. There was a group of deaf dancers performing & their dance instructor was continuously giving them counts. So for us it was a challenging scenario to solve this problem & we started researching about it. Then we realised that deaf people usually relate sound to vibration. So we started converting choreography counts into vibrations. We have different vibration patterns like four beat pattern, three beat pattern, which will tell the deaf dancers what is the speed of the music. So then we expanded the scope of the product & now we have a watch which can convey any sound that you want to get notified for.

At that time we didn't have money, so we used to design freelance projects to support this venture. Luckily we got great support from Zone Startups. Zone Startups gave us all the infrastructure support, mentorship. Then came in Social Alpha, a Tata Trust initiative. We also got some investment from IIT Bombay, from their incubator, SINE.

We started one small activity called Ask Blee, where we used to take all the questions & we used to answer them in Indian sign language. We started this as a marketing initiative to actually reach out to the deaf community. Extension of this activity is now an Android app, BleeTV, which is already live. We have more than five thousand downloads. We have English learning videos, we have political videos, we have news related videos.

We see great potential in both our products. Blee Watch, the commercial version, will be ready in 3-4 months. Cost price of the product will be somewhere around Rs 7,500. We are obviously trying to get it as low as possible, but for that we will need to manufacture in bulk.

We are working with a company called Design Alpha. These guys are handling our optimisation for manufacturing. We are exploring different opportunities like CSR funding, where we can donate some devices to some of the individuals. We are also looking at direct B2C sales & we are also partnering with different NGOs & institutions who are working for the deaf & will be getting bulk orders from them.

First Published:Aug 22, 2018 7:24 PM IST