HearMyCall

Inspiration

Persons with hearing or speaking disabilities can only "call" for emergency help by SMS in Estonia (elsewhere in other country, e.g. Germany, UK, etc). Getting help via SMS takes up 5 times longer than a normal phone call and is less convenient to use.

According to our understanding, this increased time goes against the spirit of Article 26.4 of the Universal Service Directive of the EU which states "... that access for disabled end-users to emergency services is equivalent to that enjoyed by other end-users". Furthermore "Measures taken to ensure that disabled end-users are able to access emergency services whilst travelling in other Member States shall be based to the greatest extent possible on European standards... " The 112 SMS service is only available to some one with an Estonian ID-number and requires pre-registration. This makes the service not accessable for foreign disabled persons in Estonia. To conform with the spirit of the directive, a service is needed which guarantees that there is no signficant difference in response times to an emergency call from a disabled and a not disabled person. The service should available without pre-registration.

What it does

We envision a video call system, either an existing one or a newly developed one.

Challenges we will ran into

We don't have direct competitors, only compitition for financing from the state budget. Previously a similar solution had been developed in 2018 but it was not implemented due to lack of financing from Estonian state.

Target group

Our target users are persons with hearing and speaking disabilities which prevent them from calling 112. Our customer is the Estonian state in general and to be more precise the minestery of finance.

What's next for HearMyCall

At the moment, we gather all necessary information about what has been done so far and why no other solutions have been implemented yet.

Due to the recent crisis, our team lead cannot work at full capacity on the project. We have to wait until everything normalises a bit before we can take significant further steps.

What we want from this hackathon

• Connect with like minded people
• Present the idea to a wider audience