Here’s how a father’s love for his daughter compelled him to create this safety wearable

Yeo Kee Jun, a Malaysian student, recently left his home together with his family in Jalan Klang Lama, Kuala Lumpur after their house was broken into six times over the last 12 years. The last three times had occurred over a period of four months. The family was also victim to six robberies, a mugging, and several car theft attempts.

None of these crimes, however, strike as much fear into the hearts of parents as kidnapping and murder cases. Late last year in Petaling Jaya, the body of a 15-year-old girl named Ng Yuk Tim was found dead in a suitcase. The schoolgirl had gone to her friend’s home in the morning, and subsequently went missing for the next two days. Her 23 year old friend later confessed to the murder.

One programmer was especially affected by the incident, and vowed to do something about it. Ray Teng, founder of Malaysia-based safety wearable WaryBee, has a daughter and a son, and at that point in time couldn’t help but worry about their safety. “I immediately thought, if this happened to my daughter, what would I do?” he recalls.

The older she gets, the more I worry. As a father, I can’t help but be concerned. As such, I wanted to do something that could help not only myself feel more at ease, but other parents as well.

Together with his partner Bernie Eng, they set out to find the perfect solution. They had several false starts at first:

Initially we decided to try out voice activation via the victim’s phone – all he or she needs to do is shout out for help, and an alarm would be activated. However, after some testing, we realized that since phones are usually kept in one’s bag or jeans pocket, it might not be able to capture the voice properly.

The next thing that they tried was motion sensing. In this case, a victim would need to wave his or her phone in a certain shape in the air, and the alarm would be triggered. As expected, a lot of false signals were created by the motion of the phone being accidentally moved around in non-threatening situations.

The duo finally hit the jackpot when they had a chat with a hardware guy, who was a friend of Eng. “He told us, ‘why not create a wearable item to act as the trigger?’ That’s where the idea for WaryBee came about,” Teng says.

A beautiful panic button

WaryBee as a red pendant on a necklace.

The WaryBee wearable comes in the form of a necklace or bracelet, but the triggering device is hidden in a tiny pendant on the jewelry. Teng describes it as a ‘panic button’ – all that the victim needs to do is press it, and a signal will be sent to the phone of a person – or several people – of their choosing. These people are called ‘guardians’, and will need to install the WaryBee mobile app to receive the signal.

Pre-empting potential problems

Crowdfunding for market validation

First of its kind