Key4Inclusion

Lack of literacy, numeracy and cognitive development, sometimes allied to motor skills, impact the future with diseases, disabilities and the future of work. 

Key2enable empowers People with motor, physical and intellectual disabilities to develop their skills and individualities by providing innovative Assistive Technology tools that together with a unique inclusive educational platform for school inclusion, changes the way and the hard time that children with disabilities face school, greatly increasing the possibility that they will be self-sufficient in the future. We understand that there are cases that are more serious, but we need to remember that in each person we find different skills. With our solution it will be possible to start the most assertive interventions even in early childhood. When we change the life of this child, we also change the lives of his family and the community where they live. 

We solve the problem of people with disabilities that are unable to use computers and mobile devices due to motion limitations of lack of fine motor coordination. More than 3% of a population have physical or motor disabilities, and more than 20% have other types of disabilities. According to Coherent Market Insights, globally, more than 1 billion people need 1 or more Assistive Technology products. The lack of a complete platform that 
can help teachers or professionals in the field of inclusion to improve the way they welcome these children into the school and inside regular classrooms, so that they can learn more quickly and at the same time with quality, completely disrupts the future of this individual taking away his chances of being self-sustainable. Not educating them means losing the possibility of knowing his skills in the future. Without the right technological tools, teachers won't be able to provide them with digital literacy as well as the durable skills needed to stay apace with the changing job market and economic downturns they will face in the future. So, we have to change it now, in their early childhood.

We have an essential set of assistive technology that helps people with disabilities that are unable to use computers and mobile devices due to motion limitations or lack of fine-motor coordination. Our solution Key-x primarily works as a keyboard and a mouse and brings digital accessibility to people with disabilities by providing innovative tools for accessing computers with greater autonomy even using eye blinks or slight body gestures, for communicating, learning, gaming and living. Together with our educational platform, people with intellectual disabilities efficiently use computers and mobile devices. If scaled globally it will reach Millions of people including their family, schools and the community they live. The innovation of our solution resides in its design, built to fit a wide variety of motion limitations while being compatible with any computer, smartphones and tablets. Our device can be used by children and adults. Some of the disabilities that we help: Cerebral Palsy, Motor sequels of strokes, Sequels of spinal cord injuries, ALS,Parkinson's disease, Intellectual disabilities (including Down syndrome and many cases of autism). Using our software we can detect in childhood, some dysfunctions that could be taken care of when they are in the beginning.

We are working in many states and cities in Brazil. In a particular municipality called RECIFE, we are helping more than 2000 children including Down syndrome, different degrees of autism, physical and motor disabilities, to show their skills and taking some of them out of the invisibility. Seeing your child communicate with the world is one of the greatest wishes of parents of children with disabilities. And this achievement was made possible by the use of technologies that help students learn in the public school system. Diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth, Amanda Cabral, 10, is in her fifth year of elementary school and is now able to express herself because of our educational solution called Key-X. Now, she is able to write and can use a notebook to attend classes with her classmates, and is no longer invisible.

The same happened to Alison, 12 year old, who was learning in a separate room, and when our solution was installed in his schools, as soon as he started using it, he asked his teacher to write a book because he had an story to tell. The municipality published his book last year. It will completely  impact his future positively.

I understand that this challenge is to support and equip workers with tools to improve their chances to be economically sustainable. We can do that! But why exclude people with disabilities who mostly have been in lock down for years inside their homes? If these people have the chance to educate themselves with the same quality as children who do not have a disability, when they become young and adults, they will be able to work even inside their homes because they will have technological skills to be able to meet some demand. We have real cases to show. 

Key2enable developed during the last four years a complete set of Assistive Technology composed by hardware and Software solutions that together attends more than 80% of all disabilities found inside schools and rehabilitation centers. 

The Key- X multi functional keyboard solution is a unique innovation of its kind. Most of our competitors offer communication devices to enable individuals with disabilities to use technology. Most of them are not compatible with different operating systems (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Tablets, etc).

Many have several limitations that make them ineffective for use by people with various forms of physical, motor, and intellectual disabilities. Key2enable developed an ALL-IN-ONE solution with which ANY other Assistive-Technology in the market can be connected, enabling them to communicate, learn, work, play, deliver content, local or on-line,curriculum-based or otherwise, to their homes, schools, clinics, and rehabilitation centers.

The novelty of our innovation also resides in the possibility of our solution to accept all other peripherals and accessories of Assistive technology manufactured by other companies, making our solution unique and thereby facilitating their use by our end users, including with reuse of technologies that alone no longer made sense.

It is also present in Universal Design, which is the possibility that a person without disabilities may use the solution.

Our technology is based on IOT. We use microprocessors, microcomputers, peripherals and accessories in our hardware line to create data entry for people with disabilities. The original idea of the keyboard was born from the need for a computer scientist, Gleison-Fernandes in Brazil, who was born with cerebral palsy to improve the way he needed to interact with the computer. It was built from a real pain and adapted to attend others.  Nowadays we have already developed the idea quite a bit in terms of knowing with the user's permission, how much time he has been using, where he is, if he is having difficulties and several other functions that allow us to improve the quality of that user's autonomy. Our Education Platform uses Artificial Intelligence to understand the development of intellectual disabilities better by collecting real-time data. We will be able to measure how long a person stays inside a task, and by doing that, the Platform itself will propose another one. It should be more difficult or more accessible than the last one. As it is a gamified-platform, as soon as the student completes the levels, we will be able to measure the knowledge and the performance of each user. We release reports for professionals to tackle specific difficulties and make the right interventions at the right time. All we are doing, is to improve that human being life in the future. The present for us is to empower and improve but the goal is make them thrive.

We have found that teaching children to communicate through our solution can have an immense impact not only on their lives but also in the community they live. We have a huge amount of feedback from parents and teachers. We have people whose brains were stimulated and they were just waiting for a technology to come to be able to express themselves. We have cases of elderly people who were bedridden and were unable to talk to the family. The fact is that by changing the present of these people, we are changing their future completely. Future of Work also!
Our technology could change the lives of millions of people if it were adopted by a government education ministry. Despite Brazil being a country with a political bias and its economy has been growing, we still face some difficulties regarding the money allocated to programs for inclusive education. But even with this difficulty, today we are working within more than 400 public schools, 110 rehabilitation centers and more than 5000 end-users (People with disabilities).  
The secret of this was the patience to showcase our solution to the special education professionals and prove to them that we would facilitate and accelerate the way of teaching PoD if they decided to use it.

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Key2enable empowers People with disabilities to develop their skills and individualities by providing innovative Assistive Technology tools that together with a unique inclusive educational platform for school inclusion, allow them to efficiently use computers and mobile devices for communicating, learning, gaming, work and ultimately live with greater autonomy to be economically sustainable in the future. For Schools, rehabilitation centers, and Healthcare professionals, we install all the solutions inside the classrooms, and we train the teachers and the caretakers to use them with the children or the patient. By doing that, we give them autonomy, so they become the main actors in their learning process, which, of course, will shorten the time they usually take to develop their skills. 

This is our IMPACT: Full integration of people of determination in society by leveraging technology to communicate, learn, play, engage and work self sufficiently and be economically sustainable.

Our outcomes:

Brain stimulation for early childhood, Teachers of Special education are being trained to use the solution with their students, professionals who work in rehabilitation centers and also those who have their own clinic are being empowered to use the solution with their patients, Social campaigns are being released to increase the knowledge by companies and organizations that people with disabilities will be able to work with the right tools, Companies and organizations that want to provide job to people with disabilities are aware of our technology , have a partnership or a network of partners, from the private sector and also with the not-for-profit world, government entities that adopting the platform, a solution for job placement and job creation.

Until now, in Brazil, we have been bootstrapping our solution and we achieved more than 5000 people. We are already profitable in that region. With the right investment, the right investor and the perfect team we know how to build, We want to multiply the idea of making pilots inside schools and rehabilitation centers so that hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities can have massive access. In one year from now we plan to reach at least 30000 children if no investment or grant come, but we plan to reach 1.000.000 with grants and investments. Upon completing 5 years our predictions are very bold mainly in the MENA region, India and Africa, but we are fully convinced that they can be achieved by the simple fact that there is not yet a complete tool to assist teachers of special education in their tasks and even with the power to decrease the time that a child with a disability takes time to actually learning a school curriculum. We have the goal to reach 1.000.000 people with disabilities in the next 5 years. The explanation of the number placed above is precisely in the power of multiplication of a solution that works and helps the professionals who take care of these people. When knowing that the solution brings the expected result and still facilitates their work so that they can serve more people, the power of the indication will make the solution spread. 

Until now, in Brazil, we have been bootstrapping our solution and we achieved more than 5000 people. We are serving 400 schools and 110 rehabilitation centers. We are already profitable in that region. In one year from now we plan to reach at least 30.000 children if no investment or grant come, but we plan to reach 1.000.000 with grants and investments. Upon completing 5 years our predictions without investment we understand we will reach near 300.000 people with disabilities. We are talking about real use. They will be inside schools and rehabilitation centers using it to thrive. They will be using it in a daily basis. They need our solution to shorten the time it takes for them to learn. So this is not like a software that you download and never use it anymore. We are talking about real people using them.

With the right investment, the right investor and the perfect team we know how to build, We want to multiply the idea of making pilots inside schools and rehabilitation centers so that hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities can have massive access. In one year from now we plan to reach at least 30000 children if no investment or grant come, but we plan to reach 1.000.000 with grants and investments. Upon completing 5 years our predictions are very bold mainly in the MENA region, India and Africa, but we are fully convinced that they can be achieved by the simple fact that there is not yet a complete tool to assist teachers of special education in their tasks and even with the power to decrease the time that a child with a disability takes time to actually learning a school curriculum. We have the goal to reach 1.000.000 people with disabilities in the next 5 years. The explanation of the number placed above is precisely in the power of multiplication of a solution that works and helps the professionals who take care of these people. When knowing that the solution brings the expected result and still facilitates their work so that they can serve more people, the power of the indication will make the solution spread. 

According to WHO-2011, an estimated 1 billion people, or 15% of the world’s population, have a disability ; 10% of an affected population [by disaster] will develop serious psychological trauma. 80% of people with disabilities live in developing countries, and there, make up 20% of the poorest of the poor, living on less than $1 a day. Disability is just as much or more about how society puts up barriers that exclude and disadvantage people with impairments by not recognizing their rights, needs and potentials, prejudice towards persons with disabilities. These barriers include poverty, lack of education, gender, religion, age, social stigma and geographic isolation. The changes need to be brought from the policy level that would make every public institutions accessible to the people living with disabilities, develop education materials for the people with disabilities and make it accessible to them, make provisions for their independent living in the community as well as support need to be provided by other funding bodies as well the government entity for responding to emergencies and natural disasters and for disaster preparedness for everyone including the people living with disabilities to control the risk. Also, a social culture should develop that accept every individual in the society equally without discriminating in any of the ways.

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All of them work full time:

Henrique Latorre: Mutant Engineer - Name a machine and he will build it!

Julio Melo: A Ph.D on the verge of technology

Esdras vitor - Makes computers talk and WALK!

WOMAN BEST-TEAM ON EARTH
Aline Rabelo - Master in finance - Helps us with the numbers

Lilian Barbosa: Specialist in Inclusive-Technology

Vivian Coelho: Specialist in Inclusive-Technology

Part-time:
Andressa Roveda - Director of the Psychology-Committee at the Neurobusiness-Society - Works with us 

Tifany Oliveira: - She is one of our co-founder-Lives in the US and works at PWC 

Mariana oliveira: Speech-Therapist

Fabrizzia machado: Behavior-therapist

We have a strong team of 12 people among them 3 engineers; Esdras, Henrique, and Adriano. We are a team of experts in software programming, artificial intelligence, and manufacture. Adriano has been working with assistive technology for the past 10 years. We also have a mechanical engineer who post-graduated in Healthcare - Marcelo Rubinger. We have Alexandre Assis that works with education for the past 20 years. We have William Oliveira, a Brazilian living in the USA for the past 30 years with a large experience in marketing and social media, selling and International Trading. And Jose Rubinger, an electronics engineer with 30 years of sales experience in many countries, a serial social entrepreneur, and holds a bachelor's degree in Business administration and finishing an MBA in Entrepreneurship. Our professionals in healthcare are 2 Occupational therapists, 1 speech therapist,1 inclusive education teacher and 1 behavior Therapist. We really know what we are doing, and the proof are the numbers that we wrote in this application.

We are working with 15 municipalities in Brazil, 110 rehabilitation centers and many NGO's. Google for education in Brazil.

In the US:

Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech Research Institute on technology development and a broader research partnership

Berkeley Haas University, Singularity University (SU.ORG) and Arch Grants in St Louis. 

We were accelerated by all of them and they introduced us to a unique network. We are working on some isolated projects. Mainly in St. Louis where we opened an office inside T-REX. They are helping us with some rehabilitation centers in the city.

In Chile: Teleton and some NGO's and associations - We are piloting our solutions inside their facilities.

In the United Arab Emirates: Authority of Social contribution, Department of Community development and the Ministry of Education. We are piloting our solution. We started in March 2020.

We operate with Subscription-based plans or built-to-fit plans for Private and Public Schools, Rehabilitation centers, clinics, special education professionals and we use e-commerce to reach the end-user. Key2enable Institutionally promotes its exponential Assistive technologies through grants and global competitions. Our product has different kinds of customers: Regular children and disabled people and their families, health, and education professionals, and institutions like rehab clinics and centers. 

Our revenue comes from direct sales plus monthly subscription plans that we call Accessibility as a service. For the end-user, we are the solution for the parents who, most of the time, struggle to find the best tools for their Kids. First, we understand their needs; then, we indicate the best one in a subscription-based plan.

For Schools, rehabilitation centers, and Healthcare professionals, we install all the solutions inside the classrooms, and we train the teachers and the caretakers to use them with the children. By doing that, we give them autonomy, so they become the main actors in their learning process, which, of course, will shorten the time they usually take to develop their skills.

We also sell training and provide professional services to empower schools and rehab center professionals. We also provide free workshops and training for try-and-buy!

Key2enable has already proven to know how to succeed in planning and expanding its business plan in Brazil. In the last 3 years, we have practically worked with our own money and we have achieved, after a lot of work, a highly profitable business model with a huge social impact. Our idea is to always reinvest a part in social causes that end up expanding our area of action and calling attention in other regions where we were not yet acting. When we started our traction in the UAE last year, we found that the same model can be adapted for this region, but with a high success factor. We are talking about an entire country where the world is paying attention to success stories. In the last few months, key2enable has done several workshops and we are ready for pilots to start operating within the Ministry of Community Development Centers, ministry of education, and some private schools and rehabilitation centers. We are looking for an investor who loves the causes of social impact but who is also interested in making a profit doing good. We have already finished our robust business plan and have many documents with real researches to show.

Until 2007 I was the owner of a company that sold computers in Brazil. I have sold tens of thousands of computers for more than 20 years and I know that somehow I contributed with these people so they achieved their goals. Thousands of them I met personally and indicated the best solution. But in 2008, when I started to build the solution of teaching music to children, and I understood that it could change a life forever,I changed my mindset and became a social entrepreneur. I have been creating other social Impact solutions since then. I confess that I even sold my house to achieve my dream of creating a project that would change millions of lives, and it hasn't been easy at all. But I seriously believe that this is my destiny and the proof of that is in the smile of thousands of children who are already changing their lives and sending me pictures and telling me about their achievements. My family is with me in this dream and it is for them and these children that I will not stop until I succeed. This fantastic opportunity at MIT SOLVE has embraced me and that's why I want to be a SOLVER. 

We have a solution that works. We are already profitable but we still can not afford to build the same market and success we have in Brazil in all markets we want. We need the best marketing people to follow us and publicize what we have been doing. Unfortunately what happens in Brazil stays there most of the times. We have thousands of children changing their lives and their family lives forever and we need to monitor and evaluate that. We need to build deep analytical reports to show what the results are changing their lives. That's why we need to fund raise. We also need to have a perfect product distribution to distribute the success we have. We need the perfect partners. But we can't stop to do everything because our team is a hard working small one.

We won first place of the Global social Venture competition in 2019 at Berkeley Haas University California. Please check: GSVC - BERKELEY

And it was very important for us. But we were not ready for investment at that time. Why I am saying this? Because 2019 and 2020 until April we won many competitions around the world. And that made me feel that we are on the right track. It also made me dream to connect with Microsoft and Google. But not only connect. We can completely disrupt special education by making Microsoft for education and google for education to be really inclusive! I have been following their traction in Brazil, in the US and now in the United Arab Emirates. They ARE NOT including people with disabilities as they should be. We want to give them our solution. We want them to make EVERY child with disability in the planet earth to use our solution. So, my dream is to stop thinking about selling our solution every day to survive for the next month,  and share it with anyone who really need it. But I think that the only possibility is to partner with one of these two giants. We were chosen by Microsoft for Startups Middle East last month and I am talking to some people, but I think that MIT SOLVE is the best option to let them understand what I have in mind.

Again, we can not forget people with disabilities. Everything we do we have to remember that they are around. We have to give them all the possibilities to thrive. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recommends that people with disabilities have full equality under the law including accessibility and independent living. Similarly, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 stresses the importance of a barrier-free environment for persons with disabilities and that they have to be included. 

Again, we can not forget people with disabilities. Everything we do we have to remember that they are around. We have to give them all the possibilities to thrive. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recommends that people with disabilities have full equality under the law including accessibility and independent living. Similarly, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 stresses the importance of a barrier-free environment for persons with disabilities and that they have to be included. 

Our platform is completely ready for adult literacy. We have numerous activities that can help people with some syndromes, learning disabilities, Alzheimer's, and several others. Activities can even be created by the family very easily. The possibilities are endless because they are assembled with any picture, photo or sound downloaded from cell phones or the internet. It will be a pleasure to be part of this initiative in Portugal. We are Brazilians and everything we have developed so far can perfectly fit everything that is being developed in Portugal. Nowadays we have several elderly people using our platform to improve reading and math calculations. Another possibility would be to use the prize to create specific content for a specific area of knowledge and to collect the results of users to improve performance and speed of learning. We can build an online database together that will enable studies in the future. We are open to any type of partnership. The project can be yours and we can build together new tools specific to some needs. We have real cases to show. Below we can see Regina, that could not attend a school when she was young. Now she received a Google certificate using our solution. 

We are totally qualified for that Prize. We need to improve our AI technology.

The educational Platform is being developed with gamified techniques for learning and built with Artificial Intelligence. AI advances among tech-based applications such as predictive text, visual recognition, and speech-to-text transcription are already showing enormous potential for helping people with vision, hearing, cognitive, learning, mobility disabilities – as well as a range of mental health. We are remodeling our educational Platform so it will understand the development of intellectual disabilities better by collecting real-time data. We will be able to measure how long a person stays inside a task, and by doing that, the Platform itself will propose another one. The task should be more difficult or more accessible than the last one. As it is a gamified platform, as soon as the student completes the levels, we will be able to measure the knowledge and the performance of each user. AI can be a game changer for people with disabilities. We are already witnessing this as people with disabilities expand their use of computers to hear and see with impressive accuracy. Now it is time for severe motor disabilities, intellectual disabilities and even some diseases and disorders. AI advances and offer enormous potential by enabling people with cognitive, learning, mobility disabilities and mental health conditions do more in three specific scenarios: employment, modern life and human connection, and we think that this will change their future forever. We are prepared to go onboard with Ai for Humanity Prize.

We are totally qualified for this prize. Our Theory of change is: Full integration of people of determination in society by leveraging technology to communicate, learn, play, engage and work self-sufficiently and be economically sustainable.

To achieve that we will have to impact millions of lives around the world. We were chosen by Singularity University Ventures (www.su.org/ventures) and we are one of their 60 Portfolio companies, because they understood we could impact Millions of lives in the near future with our solution. Now we can explore the opportunities and implications of exponential technologies and connect to a global ecosystem that is shaping the future and solving the world’s most urgent problems. So, we can make this children in some years be part of this amazing Planet by freeing their minds. What if we have some geniuses along the way? We have to remember that people with disabilities tend to be more focused and that's why sometimes we find some geniuses. 

Let's do it together! Imagine how many thoughts could not be expressed, how many ideas do not exist, how many entrepreneurs with disabilities could not propose their ideas because they didn't have the right tool at the right moment?