Once a high school exchange student in Ecuador, Mary Elizabeth McCulloch saw firsthand how those without the ability to speak were robbed of sharing their wit with so many. So, she did something about it.

When McCulloch was only an undergrad student at Penn State University, she began working to make “Voz Box” a viable product. Last year, McCulloch’s social enterprise Project Vive won the 3D Printer award and a grand prize of $5,000 at ISHOW 2017.

In March 2018, Project Vive reached a new milestone when McCulloch spoke at Cisco’s Women Of Impact (#WOI2018) event and started a movement to empower people with disabilities by giving them a voice. The Project Vive team also had the opportunity to pitch democratizing speech generating technology to Google Accessibility. You can read more about how Voz Box gives voice to the voiceless here.

Across the world, our ISHOW 2015 Kenya finalist Gearbox made news with a special feature on National Geographic’s Instagram.

The photo, taken by a NatGeo photographer Ciril Jazbec, won the photo essay award ‘Africa’s Tech Generation’ at the Pictures of the Year International.

It features ‘The smart brooder’, a pioneer product by Gearbox’s project Arinifu. The smart brooder is the brainchild of George Chege who was inspired by the cry of farmers in bringing up chicks at the brooding stage where they are most susceptible to dying. It is an environmental control device which regulates the environment of the brooding space automatically and sends real-time alerts to a farmer’s phone in case of any problem.

Read more about how Arinifu is impacting farmers lives through technology here.

ASME originally created ISHOW three years ago after our research showed a tremendous lack of support for hardware innovators seeking to enter global markets and make a societal impact. We couldn’t be more proud of the strides our innovators have made or how far they have come!

If you would like to be a part of our hardware and engineering community, join us at your nearest ISHOW this year.