Carlow woman to launch her life saving innovation at Showcase Ireland event this weekend

CARRICKDUFF mother of three Maria Porter will formally launch her life-saving KnowMe Tag product at the Showcase Ireland event in the RDS from 18-20 January.

KnowMe Tags are smart battery-free tags that can be worn on your wrist or kept in a wallet, which stores a person’s medical history, and which can be scanned by first responders and medical professionals in cases of emergencies or crises.

The tags work completely offline, require no batteries or charge, and no external apps are needed to scan them and receive the information.

“It allows families to encode their own vital medical details, contact details, and any key information that they would want to be passed on in a hurry,” says Maria.

“They're then able to put that on those that wearable tags and the cards themselves. It just removes the guesswork for first responders, and it ensures that children who are lost can be repatriated quickly. The elderly who may get confused or have a long medical history can be understood quickly, and neurodivergent children and nonverbal and preverbal people can be communicated with or can pass on key information quickly.” 

Maria, who has a background in first responding and worked in the science industry for many years, spent the past year developing the tags and soft-launched the business in August of last year.

Since it’s launch, the product has received excellent reviews from dementia and neurodivergent groups and first responders, with a paramedic, who had no knowledge of the tags, even getting in touch with Maria to say how it helped them to save a life.

“I got a phone call from a paramedic in Kerry, who said “I have never heard of you before, but I’ve come across one of your tags, and I followed the instructions that were written on the tag scanned the information with this patient, and I saved that person,” explains Maria.

“Every time I retell that story or even think about it, I get goosebumps. Now, I don’t know who that person was and I don’t know what information was on the tag, because they coded it themselves, but whatever information that was passed on saved that life,” she added.

Since August, information about the tags have been distributed to emergency services across the country, so to make first responders more aware of its presence.

The tags come in a range of different forms, such as a waterproof, silicon bracelet that does not need to be taken off and is not irritating on a person’s skin. It also comes in a card form that can be kept in a person’s wallet or as a plastic fob.

Ahead of the Showcase Ireland event this weekend, Maria hopes that the added exposure on the product might help the tags become more widely available in every community across the country.

“The ideal scenario would be that in every community, these are available in a shop, a pharmacy, a grocer, wherever. But that they are readily available for people to be able to purchase and to get the use and the power out of them. And the more people that are aware of it, the more powerful it becomes for the people that are wearing them,” she said.

Maria will be exhibiting KnowMe Tag at Stand A13 in Shelbourne Hall at the RDS from 18-20 January.

For more information about the tags, visit: http://www.knowmetag.ie/