Innovation Spotlight: FLAG-Me CIC & VIMA

Breakthrough ideas don’t develop in silos – they flourish when people come together. That’s why we launched our Innovation Showcase space, to help connect emerging innovators from The University of Manchester with the wider ecosystem.

From food production and climate change, to safety in AI and robotics, this space is home to breakthrough innovators with world-changing ideas. Take FLAG-Me CIC and VIMA for example – two pioneering innovation exhibitors who are developing cutting-edge solutions that support people living with vision impairments and improve their safety.

While FLAG-Me’s software helps pharmacists to identify patients with sight or hearing impairments in order to deliver personalised support, VIMA is a medical device that transmits important information to long cane users about the environment around them, supporting their safety.

At their recent tech showcase event, organised to raise awareness about vision impairments, our community got the chance to explore FLAG-Me CIC and VIMA’s exhibits up close, learning more about their mission, impact, and story. 

To dive deeper, we spoke to the founder Lisa Riste of FLAG-Me CIC and Etienne Jacquot and Milit Thattamparambil Ranjith of VIMA about everything from what inspired them to start to what it’s like being part of Sister’s ecosystem. Read on to find out more.

What is the mission and vision of FLAG-Me CIC?

FLAG-Me: “Our vision is to improve medication safety, and how we’re doing that is we’re empowering patients to learn about their medication. But these aren’t any patients, these are patients with sight impairments because they’re at much higher risk of errors, of things going wrong, and we’re trying to guard against that by working with community pharmacy.”

What is the mission and vision of VIMA?

VIMA: “VIMA is a device aimed at improving the urban navigation for the visually impaired. Our main goal is to make an innovative and safe design, but also to do so in a sustainable, affordable, and accessible way for the visually impaired.”

What inspired you to start your social enterprise?

FLAG-Me: “I’m a medication safety researcher at the University of Manchester, in the NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Research Collaboration, and we started hearing stories about patients who sadly had lost their lives. Patients like Christina Fletcher a former nurse, who died in 2016. Christina had a sight impairment so wasn't able to recognise medication delivered to her in error, that wasn't hers. We wanted to find a solution to try and stop that happening to anybody else again.”  

Tell us more about how you got started with this project as students. What steps did you take?

VIMA: “VIMA was actually started off by three mechanical undergraduate students at the University of Manchester. VIMA itself is a very multidisciplinary project, meaning that we need experience from lots of different areas that perhaps we might not have had in our undergraduate degree. 

“Our first step was to identify the problem, the way we did this was by talking to members of the visually impaired community, to understand what the actual challenges were with urban navigation. Having understood the problem, we then went about brainstorming and coming up with different concepts and ideas for prototypes.”

What impact do you hope your technology will have on people and healthcare in the UK – today, tomorrow and in the future?

FLAG-Me: “We’d like from today, people to start feeling safer about their medicines if they have a sight impairment. We’d like, tomorrow, to grow across all community pharmacy and hospital pharmacy settings. And then in the future, we want to make sure that everybody’s got equitable access to healthcare and everybody’s got the same levels of safety.

“Your question was about the UK. But because we’re a logo driven alert, we want to go bigger than the UK – we want to go global.”

What impact do you hope that your technology will have on people with visual impairments – today, tomorrow and in the future?

VIMA: “The primary objective of VIMA is to raise awareness around the urban navigation challenges that visually impaired individuals face on a daily basis. We hope that by developing our prototype further, we can create a product which is cheap, accessible, and makes users feel safe and confident while using it.”

How does being part of Sister’s ecosystem and community help you to succeed?

FLAG-Me: “Being part of Sister has been a game-changer for us [...] But it’s not just about giving us the space, it’s about the networking opportunities, it’s about the events they put on.”

“Literally, you might go and make a coffee and bump into somebody, have a chat with them, and there’s something that they know that you didn’t know before that chat. So that’s really important.”

How did the innovation exhibit opportunity and showcase event help you?

VIMA: “Being here at Sister has been an amazing time. We got to develop our first interactive prototype, that we get to exhibit on the ground floor of the Renold Hub, so a lot of people through events, and focus groups, and just anyone can come in and just interact with the prototype and give us their feedback on it.” 

Thank you to both FLAG-Me and VIMA for sharing your stories with us! We look forward to seeing your growth journey unfold. 

If you’re interested in exploring these innovation exhibits plus many more – come and visit us at Sister this summer. Exhibits will be on display until the 26th September 2025.