On 08 Dec 2017, the UNICEF Innovation Fund announces 6 new investments in open source technology solutions – Beijing Daokoudai is among one of six new portfolio companies to receive investment. Beijing Daokoudai’s Yuudee2 is part of the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) cohort and the Fund’s first investment in a company from China.

How would you describe your solution to children?

You may have friends that you play with who are having a hard time expressing themselves verbally, or who find it challenging to bring words together to form a sentence. Unfortunately, there are limited solutions and tools out there to help children who have speech and language difficulties. Beijing Daokoudai’s Yuudee2 is an application aimed to address just that. It is designed to encourage children with difficulties in speech, or language expression to interact on various designed digital scenarios in order to practice completing sentences and help guide them in building words together with ease. So… Imagine Yuudee2 as a place where you can find best and sincere friends for you. Play together with them on your phone! You can use your own way to know each other, explore and discover what they are eating and playing, try to talk with them.

How would you describe it, if your audience comprised of subject matter experts and investors?

In closer detail, Beijing Daokoudai is developing Yuudee2, an application designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) or with language disorders. It can be used to train and improve children’s ability to use complete sentences to express their language. Users of the product include children, parents, and trainers. These products are not so common in China at present, and we want to be the pathfinder and industry leader within this space.

What is unique about your solution and how is it different from what currently exists?

Yuudee2 focuses on sentence organization training using carefully chosen life and learning scenarios and interaction design. In addition, we provide a distinctive training roadmap: VB-MAPP based assessment, training courses matching training results, training effect tracking and evaluation.

Why does being open-source make your solution better?

Having an open source system allows people anywhere around the world to provide input and participate in the development of the product’s design and functionalities.  We want to be open source so that there will be more people working on improving this product, creating product extensions, and developing new solutions for autistic children and children with language disorder.