A piece of smart jewellery that can send an alert to loved ones and track the location of the wearer when it feels the woman is in danger just won the $1 million Women’s Safety XPrize. The Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPrize was launched back in 2016 as a global competition.
The competition asked teams to come up with devices that have the ability to discreetly trigger alerts when the woman believes she is in danger. The conditions that needed to be met were that the alert needed to be received within 90 seconds of being triggered and must cost less than $40 per year.
A team at India’s Leaf Wearables came up with the small Safer Pro chip that pairs with the user’s phone via Bluetooth. The Safer Pro chip can be incorporated in pieces of jewellery and can be built into any kind of device. Tens of thousands of these chips have already been sold in India.
There is an emergency alert button in the chip and a notification along with the user’s location is sent to predetermined contacts when the button is pressed twice. It also offers navigation to the nearest police stations and hospitals and constantly transmits the user’s location as a precaution. 15 minutes of charging via Micro USB offers seven days of normal usage.
“Safety is a fundamental human right and shouldn’t be considered a luxury for women,” said Anu Jain, philanthropist and founder of the Women’s Safety XPrize. “It is the foundation in achieving gender equality. With so many advances in innovation and technology today, it was unacceptable to us that we didn’t have a solution to help curb this sexual assault pandemic. We congratulate the winning team and thank all the teams that poured their heart and soul into finding innovative solutions to move humanity forward.”
You can check it out in the video below:
