ATU807 – StepSafe Kids with Ashwin Chunchu

Hi, this is Ashwin Chunchu and I’m the founder of Step Safe Kids. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 807 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on November 13th, 2026. On today’s show, we’re excited to welcome Ashwin Chunchu, the founder of Step Safe Kids to the show to talk all about elopement and how this device is able to help keep kids and other individuals safe. We’re also joined by Jack Walters from HapWare with a special update on their accessibility tool, ALEYE. As always, listeners, we want to thank you so much for taking time out of your day to give us a listen. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show. Listeners today, we’re starting the show by welcoming back Jack Walters from HapWare for some exciting updates on ALEYE. Jack, welcome back to the show.

Hello. Yeah, it’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it is awesome to have you back. Hey, before we get into the updates, for the folks who haven’t heard you on here before, could you maybe just give us a brief overview of what exactly is ALEYE?

Of course. So ALEYE is a wearable device for people who are blind, low vision, or deaf-blind, and we communicate all the different nonverbal visual cues. So things like gestures, body language, facial expressions. Someone reached out to shake your hand waving. We communicate all that information using haptics or the sense of touch on a wrist-worn wearable. And where we’ve been picking up a lot of traction in the blind low vision community is because we integrate with the Meta glasses. So you can put on your Meta glasses, wear a wristband and receive all the information, or you can also use your phone. But that is ALEYE and that is what we do.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, we’ll definitely put a link down in the show notes to your original episode just so folks can dig in further, but we wanted to have you on because you’ve got some exciting updates. So Jack, what kind of exciting updates do you have to share?

Yeah, so HapWare was just an ALEYE. It was just named one of Times Magazine’s best inventions for 2026 in the accessibility category. Yeah, it’s an incredible honor and we’re really excited to share that. And I think what makes us most excited though is really just the signal from large institutions believing in accessibility first and really the community that we’re building for. So while it’s a great recognition and point of literally for HapWare, it’s great for, I think, anyone in the assistive technology or accessibility space because I think it’s a larger signal that people know how to spell the word accessibility now. It’s something that people are thinking about. So we’re really, really honored to be named one of Time’s Best Inventions, but we’re also just honored to represent the industry as a whole.

No, that’s really awesome. And just for our listeners, FYI, I still misspell the word accessibility quite often, and I use that word a hundred times a day, but for some reason it always gets me. Jack, as we talk about ALEYE and everything, when is the official launch of ALEYE really getting out there?

Yeah, so it’s officially launching in 2027. So our timeline is we’re going through our validation testing and validation with our current and updated design of the wristband all through right now until beginning of 2027, ship out some of our production and early stage demo units out to some of our partners. So we have partners all across the country, Society for the Blind, Vista Center, different centers for the blind, and then it will launch commercially to anyone and everyone that orders one in May of 2027, so right towards the beginning months. And so that is what we’re honestly so, so excited for is just being able to finally launch the product. Obviously we’ve gone through dozens, literally dozens of hardware iterations to get to this point. So very excited to see the finalized version in our line of sight.

Oh, definitely. Yeah, to see where it all ends and be able to get it out there to folks. But what an amazing recognition. Jack, we’ve got a little bit more time to have you here. I guess you talked how ALEYE has changed as it’s gotten to where it is today. Do you have maybe a story or something along those lines of maybe something you all learned as you were developing and putting this all together that maybe either surprised you, sticks with you, or made you change the final product?

I’ll actually give one that’s super recent because obviously we have had ones very, very early on, form factor not being right, comfort, all that almost like low hanging fruit because a lot of those things you can test and then get validity from just simple pilots. One of the ones that was surprising to us was obviously we communicate these nonverbal cues. So we’ll tell you if someone is smiling or frowning or waving, really anything. And we always would just tell that person one time when that was happening because we didn’t want to overload someone with information. We didn’t want to tell them 10 things happening in a row.

We assumed that people would want it in more intervals or not as frequent. And what ended up happening was in one of the most recent beta testing rounds is that most people want all the information they can get no matter how frequent it is. So we have a feature in the ALEYE where you can select and de-select the cues you want. So some people might not select things like handshakes and waves and arms being frost and walkaways, but some people might select those. And out of the box, we gave people a bunch of presets that they could customize and build their own and select the cues that they want. But really what ended up happening is most people actually just want all the cues live all the time. They don’t want to disable any queues. So that was really interesting to us because we thought this preset thing was going to be this nifty thing where people could switch across from workplace queues to home queues to date night queues, whatever it may be.

And we still offer that because there are people that want that. But for the most part, a lot of the community just want to hear it all, whatever the information is. So that was one that was really recent actually, just a month or two ago. And that’s the philosophy behind what we’re doing is we do all nonverbal communication cues, but also what we’ve been listening to is people wanting navigational or object detection cues like, “Hey, there’s something coming up on your right, give you a little vibration to let you know.” or, “Hey, you’re about to walk into this.” whatever it may be, which is a lot of things that we could actually add just through software updates, monthly software updates that improves the overall hardware and wearable experience. So it is central to how we think about developing ALEYE and learning and growing and just making improvements overall.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Jack, if our listeners want to find out more about ALEYE and watch for the launch and watch the progress and just learn more, what’s a great way for them to do that?

Yes. Go to our HapWare.com. So it’s H-A-P-W-A-R-E.com and just join our newsletter is what I would say. I think the exact URL is HapWare.com/stayuptodate. We have a bunch of forms on our website anyway. You can enter one of them and just join our newsletter. That’s what I would say because we’re constantly sharing videos, podcasts like this, learnings from when we’re traveling. I’m currently in Dubai right now, meeting with communities out here. So we’re constantly sharing things that we’re learning, things that we’re changing, and giving the timeline and countdown of when people can finally get their device, because we’ve had a bunch of people pre-order early and get a discount, which is still open. We still are taking pre-orders, but really just giving them the transparency. It’s like, “Hey, here’s the timeline. Here it is, here it is, here it is.” So that’s what I would say. Join our newsletter, listen to some of the information, get some of that content because we’re constantly sharing.

Awesome. I will drop that down in the show notes. And Jack, thank you so much for coming on and giving us the great news about the amazing award as well as updates on when ALEYE will be out there. Thank you so much.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me.

Listeners, wandering and elopement can be a scary event for any parent. For parents of children with disabilities, it can be a very common fear. Our guest today is the founder of Step Safe Kids, and they’re here to tell us about how Step Safe Kids is able to help with this all too common problem. Ashwin, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me here.

Yeah, I am excited to get into talking about Step Safe Kids, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

My name is Ashwin. I’m a 17-year-old high schooler from Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, and I just started at the Schulich School of Business. Step Safe started as a high school project in March of 2026 and turned into a company along the way.

Nice, nice. And I guess how did you get the idea for Step Safe Kids?

Yeah, so when I was seven, I got lost in a park at around 11:00 PM at night. A really kind stranger found me and walked me back to my dad. I was really lucky and I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think much about it for 10 years. In March, I couldn’t sleep and I came back. Not the part about being lost, but what it would’ve been like for my dad as well, not knowing where I was. So I wrote the idea down in a notebook. The idea was a phone for toddlers, which was a really bad idea. Then it was a shoe tracker. There was a tracker that you put inside a shoe, then an intel-based tracker. And I spent around two months planning and researching on that before I had to kill it.

I gotcha. And how did you end up… Well, I guess let’s talk about Step Safe Kids and then we’ll get to how you settled on it. So tell us about the Step Safe Kids. What is the device like?

Yeah, so the device is 45 X 45 X 17 mm, so it’s as big as a key fob if it was a square key fob. The microphone is permanently disabled, which we did on purpose because a lot of parents have complained that the previous devices they’ve used, they weren’t being allowed in schools because of them having a microphone or they had to make some special arrangement where the parent had to sign no microphone. And I mean, we won’t use the microphone at school. And another thing is the device is IP65 certified already, and we’re working on national certifications like FCC radio certifications, like FCC and ICeNd so we can get this out to public as fast as possible.

Nice. I was researching this, I found it a little bit different from some other kind of GeoTrackers and location things. I guess, how does it connect to an app? Do I have to have a cell plan or how exactly does all that work?

Yeah, so we actually offer something pretty new. So this regular plan is 9.99 USD for Kickstarter Backers. And once we go retail in February, it’ll be 14.99, which is why Kickstarter Backers get a special thing for being the first ones. And the device itself costs 99 USC right now and it will cost 149 in retail. And the special thing I was talking about is a lifetime, which means you never have to pay a subscription ever again. You buy the device for Kickstarter Backers right now, it’s about 249 USD in retail. It would be 399, but don’t take my word on that yet. The special thing about this is never pay a subscription. You get the device once and that’s it. And about the app, we’re actually making an app for this. It’ll probably call the Step Safe app. It’ll be available on the App Store and Google Play as well as on our website. So if you don’t have a compatible phone, you can always go on your browser.

Nice, nice. I know just because in talking to folks on the show and things in the news and everything, especially with location, data is a big thing. How’s the data handled with Step Safe kids?

Yeah, so data privacy is one of our most important concerns, and I’m talking to lawyers to make sure that the product and the data handling is completely safe, COPPA compliant and PIPEDA compliant in Canada. So we take it really seriously and everything will be stored on our server securely. Now I can’t promise that it can’t be hacked, but we do as much as possible to make sure that we only store what’s needed to display location to the parent and nothing else.

Excellent, excellent. Yeah, nothing’s perfect. Nothing’s completely hack-proof, but just the fact that you are storing that and not just sending it out into the world is always a great thing. Ashwin, I said we get back to it, you talked about starting off with a phone for toddlers and realizing that was a bad idea. How did you settle on the design that you chose?

Yeah, so it was really interesting. I actually went out to manufacturers talking about the insole based idea because the phone-based product, I just killed that on day one because it didn’t make sense. But I researched a lot on this insole and I took it to manufacturers and they said this is either going to be impossible or it’s going to be really, really expensive to make it. Obviously I don’t have the money to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for development. So I asked a lot of manufacturers just how would we build this and where do you think it would go? One manufacturer stood out, their name is JIMI IoT. They’re based in Shenzhen, China. We’re working with them right now and the device itself, they made something similar, but we’ve talked to them through calls and emails just working out the final design and some things we wanted.

For example, their device had an SOS button, but children always press it a lot and we don’t want to alert parents, give them a big alarm always because children just toy with it. So we asked them, “Can you firmware modify this to make sure that this only sends out a notification on the app?” And we made a lot of modifications to the device. So the device itself, the pre-made model was made by the manufacturer, but we made a lot of non-design, more technical updates to that, like the microphone and the SOS button. And another thing, we asked for all the documentation for this FCC and ICeNd filings and all that.

Very cool. Very cool. No, and I like how you’re taking all those different pieces and parts into consideration as you put it together. I know a lot of our listeners already know the answer to this, but Ashwin, why are these locators important? You brought up your personal story, but especially for maybe parents of individuals with disabilities, why are these important?

Yeah, so these devices are really important, and I’ll actually bring in an example of a parent that talked to me. So she just messaged me about how this device would change her, and the story she said was something around the lines of she went with her son to the library and her son gave her a book and she looked at the book for five seconds and he was gone. She was running around the library, almost even started crying before she found him playing with another kid near some play area in the library. So that’s exactly why these devices are important because even if these children, they can run away in five seconds and just keeping an eye on them is such useless advice because you’re going to have some kind of thing come up and you’re going to have to look away for a few seconds and by the time you look at them again, they’re not there.

So these devices would help with that because if there’s ever an emergency, you just open the app and just check where they are right now and then you can just follow it right to where your child is. And another thing why this is really important is because almost half of children with autism wander, and I think it’s around 71% according to the NAA, the leading deaths that follow are from drowning. So I hope that these devices, they’ll be able to prevent that.

Almost certainly. And with the app and everything, will I be able to set up geofencing or different zones just to maybe get alerts if my child goes somewhere, maybe they’re not supposed to, somewhere that’s not the normal thing or towards danger, anything like that?

Yes, definitely. So in our app, you can set up safe zones and not safe zones. Safe zones are green ones, and if your child ever leaves them, you get an alert. And for not safe zones, we’re planning something a little bit different. You get an alarm if they enter a non-safe zone. We also have water-based zones. I’m talking with engineers to make something that it detects water bodies and tries to make the safe zone around them. So that way if they ever wandered near a water body, that parents would get alarm or notification right away.

Oh, yeah. Get that alert much faster when it’s that kind of situation, because like you said, that is especially large problem. Ashwin, what sets Step Safe Kids apart from maybe other GeoTrackers people might have heard of?

I think the biggest GeoTracker that people have heard of, and it’s really popular for parents, is AngelSense. And this is actually one of the reasons why I started the project because, sorry, somewhere along the way when I was researching about this, I actually didn’t start this. It was supposed to be a general tracker just for parents who worry about keeping their children safe. But then I started learning that children with autism wander a lot and AngelSense charges 45 to 65 USD a month, and I thought that that wasn’t affordable for many families. So that’s when I started to set out to make Step Safe. And this is the biggest difference between other GPS trackers and Step Safe, which is the price. The price we charge retail would be 149 USD for the device plus 14.99 subscription per month. And I wanted to make this as affordable as possible, which is why we rolled out the lifetime option so parents never have to pay another monthly subscription ever again.

And also if parents, they still can’t afford it where we’re rolling out a donation program where anyone can donate a device to families or any business or anyone. So that’s one difference. The second difference is the microphone being permanently disabled. There’s no reason for schools to object because there isn’t a microphone anymore. The one parent actually, she used to use AngelSense and she was talking about how the school made her sign an agreement saying that they couldn’t use the audio devices or some schools even just didn’t let the device in because it had two-way communication. Those are the two biggest differences.

Almost definitely. What about folks who, when I think of AirTags and these kind of, I mean, they’re not really trackers, but they do show maybe location and stuff like that. What’s a big difference between Step Safe Kids and something like that, a consumer good sort of, I don’t even know, you wouldn’t really call them trackers. I’m not sure what exactly you call them, but AirTags and things like that, just in the way that they work.

Yeah. So AirTags are Bluetooth, so they only update a location when an Apple device moves past them. There’s also, I think Samsung has one as well, but they’re the same thing. The problem is that these devices, if your child’s wandering at 9:00 PM at a park, at nighttime when there’s no one at empty park, AirTags are not going to be helpful because there’s no device that passes by them, so they can’t update. It only updates when the devices passes by them. And this can also be a problem not only in those rare situations, but also in general because AirTags often update, I think it’s about every one minute. And if you’re in some rural areas or where there aren’t many people, then it could even take up to 30 to 60 minutes. So that’s the main problem with AirTags.

Oh, definitely, definitely. Yeah. Especially when, like you said, those minutes make all the difference in the world. And yeah, if you’re out in a rural area where there aren’t phones around, your updates are going to take a lot longer whether they get to you or not.

Yeah, totally.

You talked about this a little bit, but can you maybe share a story that you remember just during development of you were getting everything put together that maybe surprised you or even really helped with the final design?

Oh, yes. Yeah, definitely. There’ve been a lot of parents, a lot of great ideas as well. They’ve actually helped with something we’re making right now, which is the non-removable option. The device right now, it can be removed. The two options that come with it right now are lanyard and clip-on. And children who are, they’re determined, they just take it off and throw it away. So what uses the device if they’re not wearing them? So we’re working on a non-removal device and parents have actually been really helpful with this throughout the process. They’ve suggested ways, for example, right now we’re making two different options, waistband and an ankle or wristband. It’s a two-in-one that can switch into either a wristband or an ankle bend.

And these ideas, I’ve done research and all that, but these ideas, a lot of them came from parents themselves, like how this would work. And the first idea, we were going to use magnets to do this, like a magnetic lock somehow. And parents said, “Oh no, this is a bad idea because children, they might ingest the magnets or it just might be a choking hazard.” So we cut that idea out. So a lot of ideas just came from parents saying, “No, this is wrong and here’s what you could do instead.” And that’s really brought in a lot of big changes to us in a positive way.

No, that’s awesome. And I love your willingness to pivot from the input, to be able to take that input, to be able to make it something that’s not just helpful but useful and that people will actually want to use. It makes a huge, huge difference. I know you’re still working on everything. You got the Kickstarter. I know you’ve already got the design, everything put together. When will Step Safe Kids actually be coming out to folks?

Yeah, so we’re manufacturing the devices with certifications and the app development already in parallel. The devices ship to Backers in February 2027, which is when the device will also go into retail. And also one other note, the non-removal wearable isn’t available yet. We’re still working with parents and manufacturers to make sure that they get the best design. So it’s not something you can order right away, but it’s in the works. And I have samples and all that as well that I’m testing.

I just wonder if our listeners want to find out more about Step Safe Kids and even order and do everything else, what’s a good way for them to do that?

So they can order at StepSafeKids.com or S-T-E-P-S-A-F-E.kids.com. And if they want to learn more, there’s a Kickstarter page. It’s a pretty long link, but if they want to just learn more about the story and all that, they can go to a Kickstarter, which will be linked to our website. And in the website itself, we’re going to have a story and what we’re doing and how parents and people can just help out with the donation we’re rolling out. Or if they want to get a device for themselves, how it’s going to work, all that information will be available on our website.

Awesome. We’ll put links to that down in the show notes so that folks can easily find it. Ashwin, what a cool accommodation and something that’s going to help a whole lot of people because I know it’s definitely an issue for a lot of parents and a fear for the ones where maybe it isn’t an issue yet. And like you said, from even your own story, it’s one of those things that can happen very, very, very quickly. And a lot of times, luckily it does turn out okay, but sometimes it doesn’t. So having some support, some help in a way to just ensure that it does end happily and good is always a great thing to have. So thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us all about it.

Thank you so much, Josh.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an assistive technology update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guest are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.