Indra, winner at the european CSR awards for its Consignos project

Indra has won the Spanish edition of the European CSR Awards as the "Best Large Company" for the Consignos project, and it will represent Spain at the European event that will take place in Brussels in the near future, along with the winning SME, Fruits de Ponent.

Emma Fernández, Indra's Talent, Innovation, Strategy Senior Vice President, collected the award from the Secretary of State for the Environment, Federico Ramos, at the event organised by Forética on the 16th of April at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid as part of the "CSR Spain 2013" international forum.

The recently completed Consignos R&D&i project has developed and tested a 3D animated voice recognition and Spanish sign language translator avatar aimed at providing access to tourism and transportation services for people who are deaf or have a hearing disability.

This experimental development project forms part of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism's Avanza Plan and it is partially funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Indra has led the project through its network of Software Labs and, in line with its open innovation model, it has promoted the participation of public and private entities, universities and associations, creating a top-level consortium made up of the EMT Municipal Transportation Company in Madrid, the ICTE (Institute for Quality Spanish Tourism), the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), the Ambiser company and the CNSE Foundation (State Confederation for Deaf People) to Overcome Communication Barriers.

Consignos aims to facilitate communication for deaf people through a virtual interpreter that provides access to contents and services offered in these settings through new technologies, as well as interacting with them. The solution makes it easier to understand information for people with hearing disabilities, for whom sign language is the natural communication mechanism and they often have difficulty understanding written language.

Although the technology developed in the project has been conceived for the design and development of information systems that are accessible to people with hearing disabilities, it can also be directly taken advantage of in many other applications, such as games for deaf children, e-learning and educational offerings for deaf individuals, video interpretation systems or signing multimedia contents.

Pilots in the Madrid EMT and in hotels

In order to guarantee its usefulness and future application, the system has been tested by people with hearing disabilities who have participated in the various project phases and have assessed the functionality in two pilots.

The first took place in a public transport setting of the Madrid EMT. Specifically, it consisted of testing the solution in the entity's informative booths located in Plaza de Castilla in Madrid.

The other pilot took place in a hotel setting by the hand of the ICTE, and it focused on computerised check-in and check-out services at Madrid's Hotel Intur Palacio San Martín, which also participated in collecting data and analysing the starting point of the project.

Commitment to innovation and accessible technologies

The honour received at the European CSR Awards is a new recognition of Indra's commitment to developing innovative solutions and services that minimise the digital divide and facilitate social and occupational integration as part of the its corporate responsibility. The company has already completed more than 40 R&D&i projects in this field and it has created eight research chairs for accessible technologies in collaboration with the Adecco Foundation and a number of Spanish universities. The company also collaborates with other institutions towards the same objective, including the Rafael del Pino Foundation and the Toledo National Paraplegic Hospital Foundation.

Indra is the leading Spanish multinational consulting and technology firm and one of the main players in Europe and Latin America. Innovation is the cornerstone of its business and sustainability, having allocated €550 million to R&D in the last three years, making it one of the leading companies in Europe in its sector in terms of investment. With sales approaching €3 billion, nearly 60% of its income is from the international market. The company employs 42,000 professionals and has customers in 128 countries.

European CSR Awards

Forética has organised the Spanish edition of the European CSR Awards. The objective is to recognise the best collaboration projects between businesses and non-corporate stakeholders aimed at innovative company management.

In this first edition of the awards, backed by the European Commission, the best CSR initiatives in Europe are recognised in order to promote the exchange of practices and solutions.