The Project

First of all, it’s important to reinforce that we only had 30 hours to deliver an MVP. And we only receive the theme at the beginning of the hackathon. We took 15 hours to define our idea and start to design and code.

As mentioned before, the purpose of the Uber’s Hackathon is to solve some problem related to urban mobility. We thought about several issues, but at some point we asked ourselves: “how can a blind person ask for an uber car? “. And that was our watershed.

We started by thinking about the blind people’s ashes related to urban mobility and we define one central question: Can visually impaired people be independent when requesting a ride via app? As you can imagine, the answer is no.

According to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Statistic Geography) in 2010 (date of the last census) 23,9% of the brazilian population had some type of impairment, and form this 18,8% dar some visual impairment, almost 9 million people. But to make sure we are working on a real problem, we asked a visual impaired person how he requested a car ride? And you can see the answer bellow:

“When I need to request a car ride, my girlfriend needs to request it for me. The Uber’s app is too visual and requires a lot of touching and because of that the TalkBack doesn’t work. The TalkBack also read the advertisements!”.

We also discovered more issues related to urban mobility for disabled people. The apps aren’t well adapted for them (we did this research in 2018). Some smartphones didn’t completely satisfy the needs of impaired people, and last but not the least, there is insecurity and lack of confidence with people that could help impared ones.

To validate our idea, we started to look at the market, searching for apps or softwares that did something similar to our purpose and we discovered that there are some apps focused on solving visual problems and other ones focused on urban mobility, but none of them focused on both. And that’s how Benguia was born.

Benguia

After all this discovery journey, we created Benguia: an app fully planned and developed to help visual impaired people to request a car ride through a smartphone. Using Benguia, the impaired ones can ask for a car from all companies (Uber, Lyft, 99, Cabify and others) through one app. Through voice commands and simple screen touches, the user can request a car, inform the destination, confirm the address, receive information about the car, the driver and about the route. The app also helps the user to identify the right car to enter on through geolocalization.

We developed the MPV, and at the end of the event, we won the hackathon.

Benguia’s Interface