Muhammad Waqas
240 million children live with a disability and are 49% more likely to never attend school. Therapy and special education cost $10,000 to $60,000 per child per year, and in most of the world the specialists simply do not exist; Pakistan has roughly one therapist for every 230,000 people.
BIG IDEA
Low-cost video games to boost disabled kids' abilities
Watch the pitch
The mission
Give every child with special needs a fighting chance to learn, grow and develop.
How it works
Clinically designed therapy and special-education exercises become augmented-reality movement games. A child stands in front of any laptop, tablet or phone, sees themselves on screen, and plays; the AI reads their body movement through the ordinary camera. No sensors, no clinic. Every game is built with therapists, psychologists and special educators, and progress reports generate automatically for parents, teachers and government dashboards.
The dream
Every child with special needs, anywhere, gets access to therapy through play. Doer at scale: WonderTree as a platform. Payer at scale: schools, therapy centers, governments and families, through subscriptions.
Potential for impact at scale
Read against four questions, in the context of the organisation’s stage: is the impact good enough, is the problem big enough, is the model simple enough to deliver at scale, and is it cheap enough for whoever pays at scale.
Good enough · impact and evidence
Two published randomised controlled trials (Games for Health Journal; Frontiers in Neurology, which recorded a 13% improvement in balance and a Cohen’s d of 1.9 on upper-extremity function). In the Zayed Higher Organization deployment across 9 Abu Dhabi centers, 80% of 324 children improved in at least one tracked skill.
Big enough · addressable market
240M children with disabilities globally; it works wherever there is a phone or laptop with a camera. Live in English and Arabic, with Greek and Urdu coming.
Simple enough · to deliver at big scale
Runs in a browser on any device with a camera, and any adult can facilitate with almost no training, which is what makes it work where there is no therapist at all.
Cheap enough · for payers at scale
Around 80% cheaper than conventional therapy, priced market by market. Profitable in FY2025 at close to a 20% net margin on about $166,000 in revenue.
So far
- 17,177 children reached across 200+ institutions in Pakistan, the UAE and the US
- 92% of teachers report visible improvement; in rural Sindh, half saw change within 4 to 8 sessions
- Backed by UNICEF, UNDP, the GSMA Innovation Fund, the LEGO Foundation, the Google SDG Accelerator and MIT Solve; US patent under review