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Every Friday we share local innovation insights sourced from tw:in, our global trend community. Here’s this week’s Spot of the Week!

The Mexico-based startup Sign’n translates speech into Mexican sign language, to help hearing people communicate with those who are hearing-impaired. After language is spoken or typed into the software, artificial intelligence tech generates an animated human that signs the translation. According to founder Briana Osorio, hearing-impaired individuals usually have 10 people in their immediate social circles who don’t know sign language. As of last month, the free program is available via the Sign’n site, and the company is set to release an app.

Sign’n resonated with our tw:in spotter Bolivar Bencosme in Latin America, who sent this innovation to us: Finally, people in Latin America are showing concern for people with disabilities. Often, these individuals were (and still are) marginalized. Sign’n is a great example of how innovation can be applied to help those with disadvantages; like TapTapSee and Aipoly for the blind community, Sign’n helps those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing lead a ‘smoother’ life.”

We’d add: there are hundreds of thousands of apps targeting first world problems. The market is saturated. So think about how you might use technology to serve entirely new customer groups? Furthermore, this showcases how the relentless democratization of innovation has empowered two inspiring young entrepreneurs from Jalisco to plug this gap in the market. If they’re able to create such a service, can you create something similar for your customers? Or, could you partner with a similar project, and make sure it reaches the most number of people?

tw:in (TrendWatching’s Insight Network) is our private Slack community, where we share and discuss innovations with hundreds of passionate trend enthusiasts around the world. Sound interesting? Join us now!

 
 
 
 
 
 
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