In this interview, Pooja Viswanathan, a Toronto‑based Founder Institute alumna and PhD, shares the story behind Braze Mobility, a company she founded in 2016 after 14 years of academic research on smart wheelchairs. A pivotal visit to a long‑term care facility, where residents with dementia were confined to manual wheelchairs due to safety concerns, sparked her passion for improving mobility and independence for disabled individuals. Leveraging her computer‑science background, she transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship out of necessity, recognizing that wheelchair manufacturers were not prioritizing the needed technology. Braze Mobility’s flagship product is the first blind‑spot sensor system for wheelchairs, providing multimodal feedback (visual, auditory, haptic) directly to the driver and designed with input from users, families, and therapists to ensure usability, accessibility, and affordability. The conversation highlights her personal journey, the problem of power‑wheelchair exclusion in long‑term care, the user‑centered design approach, and the broader impact on quality of life for people with mobility challenges.
Chapters
Hi.
So Pooja's from Toronto. She is a graduate of the Toronto FI program and doing some really, honestly, some really noble stuff in enabling different monitoring and collision, I guess, type systems in wheelchairs for disabled people. Why don't you— you could probably describe it a lot better than I can, Pooja.
Thanks. Thanks for the introduction. So just a shout out to someone who said they're in Bahrain. That is actually my birth city. So, hi, I'm now in Toronto of course, but I was born in Bahrain, lived there 12 years of my life, so very, very close to my heart. And I actually just went back after 25 years last year, so amazing the things that are happening there. So much has changed in the Middle East, so it was very exciting. But anyway, back to why I've been brought in here, I guess, is I started Braze Mobility about 4 years ago, so 2016. Before that, I had spent about 14 years doing research on smart wheelchairs. And the reason that I was really drawn to this area was actually because of the first time I walked into a long-term care facility and I saw that the majority of residents in long-term care were slumped over in these manual wheelchairs and they weren't being prescribed power wheelchairs because of a lot of safety issues. So, you know, majority of long-term care residents, for those of you who don't know, have dementia. And so that typically ends up excluding them from the use of power wheelchairs, which then really, you know, just kills their quality of life and their independence and makes them really reliable or reliant on caregivers. And so that's how I got into this whole area and got really passionate about what we can do with technology. I had a computer science background and I really wanted to apply that into healthcare, but more specifically, I kind of found my calling for assistive technology. And so That's what I started, and Braze Mobility today has essentially created the first blind spot sensors for wheelchairs that can give multimodal feedback to the driver. So the beauty of the system is it's really been designed for wheelchair users, right? So this is not robotics technology that's just been kind of slapped on a wheelchair. It's really taken the user into account right from day one, their families, therapists, pretty much all the stakeholders in the industry. In order to come up with something that's, that's really usable, accessible, and affordable for a lot of our clients, which is also a big factor.
Yeah, it's a really, it's a really laudable mission. Um, and, you know, was this something, you know, coming from a more academic background, was this your first foray, foray into, uh, into starting a company and building a product?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I would never have, uh, labeled myself as a a business anything, a business person at all, because, you know, I was very passionate about the problem that I was trying to solve. To be fair, I wasn't very keen on academic— I wasn't very wedded to the idea of being an academic either. I think the whole time I was really just chasing after the problem. And so when I got out of undergrad, and undergrad, I just wanted, you know, I just found this problem I was really passionate about. At the time, there was no industry for it. And so the only way I could have actually pursued it was going the academic route. And then I went far enough down the academic route and, you know, I started getting interviews and calls from people saying, oh, when's this technology going to be available? And I was like, uh, I have no idea. You know, I— so, so from there I started talking to the wheelchair manufacturers and then I realized it wasn't their priority. And so it really— I'd say I really became an entrepreneur out of necessity because it just felt like there was nobody else who was really in that position where they could make this a priority and take it on. ¡Cuídate!
