Travel Hands is designed to ease the outdoor commute of VIP (Visually Impaired People) by pairing them with sighted & verified volunteers to walk together to similar destinations ensuring a safe, convenient, and inexpensive travel experience in London.
Hey ! Excellent work with this project. Love it and congrats on your grant.
Intrigued to know what the app will have in store.
Will it utilise voice commands/dictation to enable easy use?
Would there also be a vetting process for volunteers?
Best of luck with everything!
@leojbarnett Thank You for the best wishes and the kind words.
The app will be designed to provide the best experiences for a VIP (Visually Impaired Person) such as easy use of voice over software and for partial sighted users, zoom facility. At the moment, some VIP use apps with voice commands depending on comfort and we will align the features to make it easy. In addition, the next of Kin of the VIP can keep track of the journey details in the app.
For the volunteers, we have a reward incentive to participate more with Travel Hands. The distance walked with VIP is converted to points, points then converted to goodies as incentives from affiliated companies that seek and value their customers under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs. Corporations can promote their products or services to a wider audience and also contribute to their welfare.
The volunteers are vet by the Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) offered by the UK government and paid by us. Also, they are provided with an online training, consisting of a Volunteer Handbook document & a short video instruction on how to assist a VIP in walking, guiding and resolving small issues that may arise. Followed by a self-assessment test and once they pass, they are paired with nearby VIP on their journeys.
@robinkunz they pay for the service to get a customer care support during the journey and we also spend on training and DBS verification of the volunteers.
“How to increase employability for the blind in the UK” led to the creation of VIP World Services.
The beginning of the journey: https://www.ishanvjha.com/employ...
VIP World community shared the challenges of travel and co-designed the idea behind Travel Hands. Discovery phase research for Travel Hands is shared in the following link - http://bit.ly/36Xq4oQ
Following this, we synthesized data to gather insights and create prototypes to test the concept by February 2020.
At the stroke of lockdown, 15 volunteers joined me to develop Travel Hands without pay for 6 months and in September 2020, we won a grant from Innovate UK and Sport England to hire and proudly pay each team member. At present, Travel Hands operates as a call center service and has conducted 30+ journeys in London since launching in May 2021 with 50+ VIP, 100+ Volunteers registered and converted testing users to paid customers in July 2021.
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