Design Entrepreneurial Solutions: Enhancing Innovation for our Communities

Bringing a new idea to life can involve a lot of risk, but enFocus offers a way for young entrepreneurs to minimize their risks and channel their entrepreneurial spirit. Our Research, Development, and Entrepreneurship portfolio offers Fellows the unique opportunity to explore a community need, develop a social initiative, or create a start-up in light of a unique challenge a community may face. Fellow Riley Ellingsen and project manager Caitlin Sears have founded start-ups and continue to advance their businesses forward in hopes of easing lives.

Riley Ellingsen is the co-founder and CEO of heARsight, a venture-backed startup based in South Bend. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Danny Fritz, his co-founder, noticed that folks in the hard-of-hearing and d/Deaf community had a difficult time reading lips and understanding people who were masked. Together, Riley and Danny’s passion for entrepreneurship led to their invention of real-time transcription software that, when paired with augmented reality glasses, allow users to, essentially, turn on captions wherever they go. Now, heARsight is dedicated to empowering people who are d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing with innovative solutions that contribute to better speech comprehension and improved quality of life.

heARsight has come a long way from its origins. With pre-seed round funding to support a higher-fidelity prototype and preliminary user testing with waitlist members, they hope to bring heARsight to users soon. In their latest news, they have selected ActiveLook technology from MICROOLED to implement with heARsight’s mobile applications. Ultimately, the partnership will deliver user-friendly iOS and Android applications with ActiveLook compatible eyewear to launch the first round of beta testing with participants sourced from the 1300 member waitlist.

The story and mission behind heARsight is inspiring, and it is also bringing substantial hope to consumers. Challenges faced by hard-of-hearing and d/Deaf communities are diminished with the power of real-time subtitles. The glasses empower users to be active in conversations and detracts from the stigma of hearing loss by offering an alternative and/or an enhancement to other hearing aid devices.

Fellows can use their RDE time to develop meaningful technological advances for communities that face unique challenges. Riley speaks about the opportunity to provide a product that will significantly enhance the quality of life for its users. He shares, “Our mission is to remove barriers faced by individuals who have hearing difficulties. Together with our hardware partners, we are ready to provide an unparalleled hearing assistive technology experience that empowers our users to fully engage with the world around them. By enhancing access to spoken information, we believe that heARsight’s technology will be a game changer for people who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing, promoting their inclusion and independence.”

Former Fellow and now project manager Caitlin Sears is also developing a tool to help others. Her passion and profession, speech-language pathology, inspired her to create her start-up, Mimik. Mimik is an app in development for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) that transcribes audio to symbols representing speech sounds. The technology focuses on a user-friendly app that can phonetically transcribe speech for SLPs creating more consistent, accurate, and time-saving transcriptions.

The opportunity to create a resource for SLPs is valuable to the field. Caitlin elaborates on the opportunity to advance speech-language pathology for the community she worked in before her time at enFocus. She says, “Mimik will allow SLPs to provide improved quality of care through accessible data while reducing time spent on data collection.”

Mimik hopes to provide intuitive and simple settings for speech pathologists to document treatment and evaluation contexts, while also visualizing patient progress and session reports for easy and intuitive patient documentation. Currently, Caitlin and the Mimik team are working on their Beta MVP (Minimal Viable Product) in preparations for clinical trials in early 2024.

Although Riley and Caitlin have different approaches to solving the challenges their communities face, both are passionate about providing unique solutions through technological innovation. At enFocus, we look forward to supporting the entrepreneurs in their latest achievements, and continuing to have an impact on various communities through our RDE work.
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