25-year-olds Nupura and Janhavi have invented Blee Watch - a smart watch for the hearing impaired

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.