The Mobility Unlimited Challenge has announced a crowdsourcing initiative, aimed at helping inspire entrants in their quest to develop life-changing technology for people with lower-limb paralysis. The #mymobilityunlimited campaign will invite people around the world to share their life experiences with lower-limb paralysis and the solutions they would like to see to the challenges they face every day.
The Challenge’s organizers are seeking teams around the world to create game-changing technologies that will help radically improve the mobility and independence of people with paralysis. They will use $4 Million in prize money to drive and reward the development of personal mobility devices incorporating intelligent systems. The mobility solutions of the future could include anything from exoskeletons, to artificial intelligence and machine learning, from cloud computing to batteries.
In order to open the challenge up to as many people as possible, ten Discovery Award prizes of $50,000 will be presented to support small, early stage innovators. A panel of expert judges will then pick five finalists who will each receive $500,000 to take their concepts from an intelligent insight to a prototype. The Challenge winner will receive $1,000,000 to make the device available to users- with the winning concept unveiled in Tokyo in 2020. Interested innovators can apply online by 15 August at mobilityunlimited.org.
This Challenge will culminate in the unveiling of the winners in Tokyo in 2020. It encourages a user-centered approach and invites people with lower-limb paralysis, across the world, to take part in a global conversation about the types of mobility technology innovations they would like to see, using the hashtag #mymobilityunlimited. These suggestions will then be used to inspire entrants to create genuinely life-changing technologies that directly address the issues faced by users on a day-to-day basis