TUNIS – A orderly wheelchair design built by a team of young Tunisian ladies folks engineers has reached the finals for a prestigious European inventors’ prize, setting a hopeful precedent in a nation embroiled in a pair of crises.
Their mission, Moovobrain, enables wheelchair users to rush by a assortment of touchpad, voice report, facial gestures or, most impressively, a headset that detects their brain signals.
It has been shortlisted from over 550 applicants for the final round of the Younger Inventors Prize, launched by the European Patent Office in 2021.
This year marks “the first time a Tunisian and Arab team has reached the final” stage of the worldwide competition, the EPO acknowledged in a observation.
The all-female team will compete towards two other finalists, from the Netherlands and Ukraine, for the cease prize on July 9 in Malta.
The inspiration for the Moovobrain app first got here from co-founder Souleima Ben Temime, 28, whose uncle used to be “forced to spend a wheelchair to rush” after his higher body used to be paralysed.
“There used to be a obvious and urgent need in front of me,” she suggested AFP.
“I talked about it to my guests and we determined to spend the digital health applied sciences … to make a product that could well lend a hand a range of oldsters.”
– Success towards odds –
The four inventors met on the Larger Institute of Scientific Sciences in Tunis, where they started establishing the Moovobrain prototype in 2017, earlier than establishing health-tech originate-up Gewinner two years later.
The team’s global success comes despite Tunisia’s growing economic and political turmoil in fresh years that has pushed thousands of Tunisians to glimpse a greater existence in Europe by dangerous in a foreign nation journeys.
President Kais Saied, elected in October 2019, has launched a sweeping vitality grab since he sacked parliament in July 2021.
The political disaster has been compounded by a biting economic meltdown — nonetheless that has no longer dampened the young ladies folks’s spirits.
Moderately, co-founder Khaoula Ben Ahmed, 28, is hopeful that reaching the finals within the Younger Inventors competition will bring the team “visibility and credibility”.
“It be no longer continually easy to persuade investors or wheelchair manufacturers that our resolution is in actual fact modern and invaluable for folks with reduced mobility,” she acknowledged.
For them, even “asking to be grew to vary into in direction of the tv”, when they “cannot command, no longer be pleased any autonomy, can change into very attempting on a psychological stage”, added Ben Ahmed.
Alongside Ben Ahmed and Ben Temime, the opposite team participants are Sirine Ayari, 28, and Ghofrane Ayari, 27, who’re no longer linked.
– ‘Favourable ecosystem’ –
The Younger Inventors Prize — which rewards “distinctive inventors below the age of 30” — awards a first prize of 20,000 euros ($21,600), a 2d of 10,000 euros and a third of 5,000 euros.
The team says being ladies folks used to be “an lend a hand” because they had been in a field to grab fragment in competitions for female engineers and receive specialised funding.
More than 44 p.c of engineers in Tunisia are ladies folks, in preserving with the United Countries, and Ben Ahmed says the nation has “a favourable ecosystem” for originate-usadespite its challenges.
Their originate-up Gewinner will very rapidly carry the first four wheelchairs equipped with the contemporary know-how to an organisation for disabled folks in Sousse, jap Tunisia. They hope for suggestions to make stronger the product.
Internationally, Gewinner is specializing in Europe and has already established a partnership with an Italian producer within the short term.
The inventors utter that although each orderly chair costs around 2,000 euros, they hope to substantiate the know-how is on the market to as many folks as imaginable, collectively with those in less effectively-off countries.
“In Tunisia, now we be pleased ready 30 items, no longer with the premise that this could occasionally be the discontinue one who pays, nonetheless organisations supporting associations which is able to be in a field to sponsor the hang of chairs or adaptation of our know-how,” acknowledged Ben Ahmed.
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By Francoise Kadri
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