Lup, the Basque pocket magnifying glass that transforms textual content into voice, wins a Mapfre Foundation award

An clever pocket magnifying glass, created by three Basque college college students two years in the past, to facilitate the autonomy of visually impaired folks of their day by day duties is among the successful initiatives of the Fundación MAPFRE Awards for Social Innovation, which rewards following “standards based mostly on in its potential for social influence, its technical and financial feasibility, and the capability and expertise of the workforce.”

LUP is “the primary technological pocket magnifying glass, unbiased of the attention, that captures pictures of texts and converts them into audio information that it reads robotically.” The Basque startup was born from a last diploma undertaking by Uxue Mancisidor and Apurva San Juan, Entrepreneurship college students on the Business School of Mondragón University. The younger folks contacted Eneko Calvo, a pc science scholar on the University of the Basque Country, and after two years they’ve managed to make the undertaking, now awarded, a actuality.

For Uxue Mancisidor, co-founder and CEO of LUP, with this award “LUP is acknowledged as a novel expertise able to fixing one of many nice issues that society suffers each day: the shortage of accessibility in studying. Granting extra autonomy and independence to folks with imaginative and prescient issues is the target that we set originally of the undertaking, and for which we’ll proceed to take a position after receiving this award”.

different awardees

The different two awarded initiatives have been Acceleradora Unoentrecienmil, a non-pharmacological remedy unit put in on the La Paz University Hospital in Madrid for kids with most cancers based mostly on bodily train. And additionally the American undertaking This App Saves Lives (USA), the free utility that rewards those that don’t use their cell phones whereas driving with reductions on main manufacturers available in the market.

The goal of the awards is “to enhance folks’s lives via initiatives and entrepreneurial groups which can be reworked into proposals of excessive social worth.”

The three winners will obtain a person prize of 40,000 euros to develop their initiatives, in addition to free consulting from EY, supplied via its Foundation to assist them develop and be extra environment friendly. They will even be a part of Red Innova, which inspires the change of professional information and contributes to social innovation.

347 entrepreneurs

The award ceremony was held this Wednesday on the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. For Antonio Huertas, Chairman of MAPFRE and Fundación MAPFRE, “these are prizes with a extremely sought-after final title, which put all of the emphasis on the Social, on serving to folks, particularly probably the most susceptible or those that want a further effort in inclusion” .

In this version, 347 initiatives have been offered, 70% greater than the earlier 12 months, developed by scientists, researchers, college college students and enterprise colleges. The 12 finalists have offered their proposals to a jury made up of execs from the enterprise subject and social entrepreneurship.

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