Public Funding for Flowsense Ltd

This application is focused on the specific, highly personal, challenge of how visually impaired women manage their period protection routine. Managing personal hygiene for sighted women is relatively straightforward due to the ability to visually monitor their own state with complete privacy. This is not the case for visually impaired women, in effect they are only able to monitor their cycle with a sighted peer or family member. In this case independence, privacy and discretion is entirely absent for the visually impaired women. Flowsense is a recently formed company established by a highly innovative designer. The designer, Muna Daud, has developed an experimental prototype device that is based on a small "intelligent" sanitary device that directly detects period blood when placed in the user's underwear. The ultimate aim is to have an active device that indicates the status of the menstrual cycle to the user using discrete methods. While the engineered aspects of this concept are understood, the immediate challenge for Flowsense is to understand the product design and interface challenges associated with the needs of visually impaired women. Access to and engagement with visually impaired women is the primary focus of the enclosed Design Foundations application. Flowsense is seeking investment to conduct a vital programme of people centred design with a panel of visually impaired women to discover and understand their personal care product needs. Once this work is completed, Flowsense will have validated user needs and precise VI user requirements. This will enable the team to determine the exact development and production cost of the product. Crucially, it will enable Flowsense to pitch to investors to obtain the funds to complete a formal product development and production scale up studies.