AXSChat Podcast with Wendy Mandell Geller the DisabledCEO

Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.

6 years ago, at age 35, Wendy became the Queen of Social Distancing when she became a disabled chronic Lyme disease fighter. Feeling exhaustion, pain and like daily flu with autoimmunity issues that makes Wendy catch what sicknesses others have when in groups — meant she couldn’t travel on a plane, go to work meetings or even go with her boys to their school events.  

In 2015 from her recliner, she invented the YES to SEX app, a safe way to learn about sexual consent. It was then that she realized if domestic violence event began around a sexual encounter — no one could just sit-up or run to the bathroom with their phone and have a conversation asking for Emergency help. She also learned that if a person called and hung-up, the Emergency operator would have no idea where they were calling from.  

To fix these Emergency Caller issues, in 2016 Wendy invented SafeTracer’s distress transmission: a universal update to the standard “Emergency SOS” caller tools on every smartphone and wearable. This is a completely new user interface designed to stop SOS butt-dials, while it shares every caller’s SOS location and helps protect every victim in an emergency situation, especially people that can’t talk, hear or move when danger strikes.  

In 2019, she took on the DisabledCEO title to show the world that even though she is disabled, she can accomplish amazing things — this was inspired by the Valuable 500’s CEOs talking about their invisible disabilities.  

Educating the world’s top executives about the problems with Emergency Calls being non-accessible and non-usable to so many millions of victims through social media, while marketing my SafeTracer and disability-focused FastFactsSOS products exclusively online to Apple and Google was a big challenge until COVID-19 hit. Now everyone is working from home, they don’t expect me to fly out to conferences to be able to meet in person — with phone calls and Zoom meetings being commonplace, this works so much better for me!  

As a Founder’s Circle member of the Global Alliance Disaster Recovery Acceleration, she ready to help make everyone in this world feel safer and be better protected on every Emergency Call by 2021.  

Wendy knows she can make this universal Emergency Caller update happen, and asks for the continued support and backing of the disability community, as convincing big tech’s Public Safety and Accessibility departments about these over-looked lifesaving Emergency Caller needs is not easy, but it is definitely possible — and she patented solutions all ready to help save people from Emergency danger worldwide.