In honor of April as World Autism Awareness Month, Israel-based safety-tech company AngelSense has announced the launch of a new, smaller and lighter version of their proprietary live tracking device. With this latest version, AngelSense aims to provide safety and peace of mind for families with autistic or special needs family members. The service is currently in use by families across the US, Canada and the UK.
AngelSense’s monitoring technology and safety features provide protection for real-life emergencies that many families with special-needs and autistic members – of all ages – often experience. The company’s iAlerts are designed to proactively detect unsafe situations in order to prevent emergencies and enable peace of mind for parents and caregivers.
With a smaller device, the company is able to introduce new wearable accessories that accommodate a wider range of wearing preferences such as watch bands, lanyards and belt clips. The device includes new features such as indoor search capabilities, fall detection and a step counter.
“Our solution has a huge impact on the lives of the families,” said AngelSense cofounder Nery Ben-Azar. “By harnessing the most advanced technologies, now also with a more powerful and smaller device, AngelSense is able to provide maximum safety that reduces the overall stress level of the families. This allows parents to be less restrictive and have their child experience additional types of activities as they grow to be a more independent adult.”
The vast majority of AngelSense employees are also parents of children with special needs. The company’s customer care team is entirely made up of such parents who use the device with their own children.
AngelSense has built a distributed call center that provides the opportunity for these parents to re-enter the workforce, working part time from their own homes, while still being able to take care of their children. This unique arrangement developed an organizational culture of mutual support in which agents replace shifts with other agents on an ad hoc basis whenever a child requires immediate attention. It also allows the agents to help other parents facing similar challenges and contribute to the larger special-needs community.
In the last month alone, more than one million iAlert proactive notifications were sent via the AngelSense app to notify families of their loved ones’ change of location, departures from or arrivals at school, late departures or arrivals, presence in unknown places and even alerting them to school buses that were driving dangerously.
In honor of autism awareness, a street fashion show took place in Tel Aviv on March 29, in order to bring attention to a national fundraising campaign for people with autism. The show was conducted by ALUT–The Israeli Society for Autistic Children, and the Association for Children at Risk-Autism Treatment and Research Center.
“The Association for Children at Risk and ALUT have been working for years to raise awareness of autism among the public,” said Tzipi Nagel, CEO of the Association for Children at Risk-Autism Treatment and Research Center. “An ongoing and consistent effort must be made to raise awareness for equal rights for people with autism. The fashion show is a happy, colorful and optimistic event that conveys a powerful and empowering message. I am proud of everyone who contributed to its success and thank everyone who helped create it.”